Related papers: Multi-Task Off-Policy Learning from Bandit Feedbac…
We study off-policy evaluation and learning from sequential data in a structured class of Markov decision processes that arise from repeated interactions with an exogenous sequence of arrivals with contexts, which generate unknown…
How to explore efficiently is a central problem in multi-armed bandits. In this paper, we introduce the metadata-based multi-task bandit problem, where the agent needs to solve a large number of related multi-armed bandit tasks and can…
Offline Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown potent in many safe-critical tasks in robotics where exploration is risky and expensive. However, it still struggles to acquire skills in temporally extended tasks. In this paper, we study the…
Multi-action dialog policy, which generates multiple atomic dialog actions per turn, has been widely applied in task-oriented dialog systems to provide expressive and efficient system responses. Existing policy models usually imitate action…
This paper investigates off-policy evaluation in contextual bandits, aiming to quantify the performance of a target policy using data collected under a different and potentially unknown behavior policy. Recently, methods based on conformal…
Policy gradient methods are widely adopted reinforcement learning algorithms for tasks with continuous action spaces. These methods succeeded in many application domains, however, because of their notorious sample inefficiency their use…
In many settings, a decision-maker wishes to learn a rule, or policy, that maps from observable characteristics of an individual to an action. Examples include selecting offers, prices, advertisements, or emails to send to consumers, as…
Large reasoning models achieve remarkable performance through extensive chain-of-thought generation, yet they suffer from a critical inefficiency: applying uniformly extensive reasoning regardless of problem complexity. We present…
We propose an extensible deep learning method that uses reinforcement learning to train neural networks for offline ranking in information retrieval (IR). We call our method BanditRank as it treats ranking as a contextual bandit problem. In…
We consider the problem of sequentially making decisions that are rewarded by "successes" and "failures" which can be predicted through an unknown relationship that depends on a partially controllable vector of attributes for each instance.…
Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…
We propose a novel problem formulation of learning a single task when the data are provided in different feature spaces. Each such space is called an outlook, and is assumed to contain both labeled and unlabeled data. The objective is to…
We consider the problem of learning personalized decision policies from observational bandit feedback data across multiple heterogeneous data sources. In our approach, we introduce a novel regret analysis that establishes finite-sample…
Contextual bandits serve as a fundamental algorithmic framework for optimizing recommendation decisions online. Though extensive attention has been paid to tailoring contextual bandits for recommendation applications, the "herding effects"…
In classic reinforcement learning (RL) and decision making problems, policies are evaluated with respect to a scalar reward function, and all optimal policies are the same with regards to their expected return. However, many real-world…
Off-policy learning enables training policies from logged interaction data. Most prior work considers the batch setting, where a policy is learned from data generated by a single behavior policy. In real systems, however, policies are…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits has seen rapid adoption in real-world systems, since it enables offline evaluation of new policies using only historic log data. Unfortunately, when the number of actions is large, existing…
We study how representation learning can improve the learning efficiency of contextual bandit problems. We study the setting where we play T contextual linear bandits with dimension d simultaneously, and these T bandit tasks collectively…
Aligning language models (LMs) with curated human feedback is critical to control their behaviors in real-world applications. Several recent policy optimization methods, such as DPO and SLiC, serve as promising alternatives to the…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) and off-policy learning (OPL) are foundational for decision-making in offline contextual bandits. Recent advances in OPL primarily optimize OPE estimators with improved statistical properties, assuming that…