Related papers: Exploration via linearly perturbed loss minimisati…
In this paper we propose a novel experimental design-based algorithm to minimize regret in online stochastic linear and combinatorial bandits. While existing literature tends to focus on optimism-based algorithms--which have been shown to…
Effective and intelligent exploration has been an unresolved problem for reinforcement learning. Most contemporary reinforcement learning relies on simple heuristic strategies such as $\epsilon$-greedy exploration or adding Gaussian noise…
In sparse linear bandits, a learning agent sequentially selects an action and receive reward feedback, and the reward function depends linearly on a few coordinates of the covariates of the actions. This has applications in many real-world…
The extreme value index (EVI) characterizes the tail behavior of a distribution and is crucial for extreme value theory. Inference on the EVI is challenging due to data scarcity in the tail region. We propose a novel method for constructing…
This work addresses the problem of regret minimization in non-stochastic multi-armed bandit problems, focusing on performance guarantees that hold with high probability. Such results are rather scarce in the literature since proving them…
Contextual bandits serve as a fundamental model for many sequential decision making tasks. The most popular theoretically justified approaches are based on the optimism principle. While these algorithms can be practical, they are known to…
Optimistic value estimates provide one mechanism for directed exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). The agent acts greedily with respect to an estimate of the value plus what can be seen as a value bonus. The value bonus can be…
Exploration is a crucial aspect of bandit and reinforcement learning algorithms. The uncertainty quantification necessary for exploration often comes from either closed-form expressions based on simple models or resampling and posterior…
Numerous heuristics and advanced approaches have been proposed for exploration in different settings for deep reinforcement learning. Noise-based exploration generally fares well with dense-shaped rewards and bonus-based exploration with…
Searching for a path between two nodes in a graph is one of the most well-studied and fundamental problems in computer science. In numerous domains such as robotics, AI, or biology, practitioners develop search heuristics to accelerate…
Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). State-of-the-art RL algorithms suffer from high sample complexity, particularly in the sparse reward case, where they can do no better than to…
We investigate an active pure-exploration setting, that includes best-arm identification, in the context of linear stochastic bandits. While asymptotically optimal algorithms exist for standard multi-arm bandits, the existence of such…
This paper introduces the \emph{confounded pure exploration transductive linear bandit} (\texttt{CPET-LB}) problem. As a motivating example, often online services cannot directly assign users to specific control or treatment experiences…
We propose the first fully-adaptive algorithm for pure exploration in linear bandits---the task to find the arm with the largest expected reward, which depends on an unknown parameter linearly. While existing methods partially or entirely…
In recent years, a number of reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been proposed to explore complex environments which differ across episodes. In this work, we show that the effectiveness of these methods critically relies on a…
Reinforcement learning algorithms struggle when the reward signal is very sparse. In these cases, naive random exploration methods essentially rely on a random walk to stumble onto a rewarding state. Recent works utilize intrinsic…
Variational inference has become one of the most widely used methods in latent variable modeling. In its basic form, variational inference employs a fully factorized variational distribution and minimizes its KL divergence to the posterior.…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, particularly Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, in complex tasks, GRPO frequently…
Pure exploration in bandits formalises multiple real-world problems, such as tuning hyper-parameters or conducting user studies to test a set of items, where different safety, resource, and fairness constraints on the decision space…
Exploration is a crucial and distinctive aspect of reinforcement learning (RL) that remains a fundamental open problem. Several methods have been proposed to tackle this challenge. Commonly used methods inject random noise directly into the…