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We propose randomized least-squares value iteration (RLSVI) -- a new reinforcement learning algorithm designed to explore and generalize efficiently via linearly parameterized value functions. We explain why versions of least-squares value…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-02-16 Ian Osband , Benjamin Van Roy , Zheng Wen

Deep reinforcement learning has enabled human-level or even super-human performance in various types of games. However, the amount of exploration required for learning is often quite large. Deep reinforcement learning also has super-human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Akane Minami , Yu Kono , Tatsuji Takahashi

Prompt engineering has become central to eliciting the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). At its core lies prompt selection -- efficiently identifying the most effective prompts. However, most prior investigations overlook a key…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Donghao Li , Chengshuai Shi , Weijuan Ou , Cong Shen , Jing Yang

Despite their success in many domains, large language models (LLMs) remain under-studied in scenarios requiring optimal decision-making under uncertainty. This is crucial as many real-world applications, ranging from personalized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Allen Nie , Yi Su , Bo Chang , Jonathan N. Lee , Ed H. Chi , Quoc V. Le , Minmin Chen

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for those tasks where rewards from environments are sparse. A commonly used approach for exploring such environments is to introduce some "intrinsic"…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Neale Ratzlaff , Qinxun Bai , Li Fuxin , Wei Xu

In this study, we introduce a novel methodological framework called Bayesian Penalized Empirical Likelihood (BPEL), designed to address the computational challenges inherent in empirical likelihood (EL) approaches. Our approach has two…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-04 Jinyuan Chang , Cheng Yong Tang , Yuanzheng Zhu

Preference-based Pure Exploration (PrePEx) aims to identify with a given confidence level the set of Pareto optimal arms in a vector-valued (aka multi-objective) bandit, where the reward vectors are ordered via a (given) preference cone…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Udvas Das , Apurv Shukla , Debabrota Basu

Multifidelity approximation is an important technique in scientific computation and simulation. In this paper, we introduce a bandit-learning approach for leveraging data of varying fidelities to achieve precise estimates of the parameters…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2022-02-22 Yiming Xu , Vahid Keshavarzzadeh , Robert M. Kirby , Akil Narayan

Existing approaches for improving generalization in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have mostly focused on representation learning, neglecting RL-specific aspects such as exploration. We hypothesize that the agent's exploration strategy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Yiding Jiang , J. Zico Kolter , Roberta Raileanu

We address the problem of efficient exploration for transition model learning in the relational model-based reinforcement learning setting without extrinsic goals or rewards. Inspired by human curiosity, we propose goal-literal babbling…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-12-10 Rohan Chitnis , Tom Silver , Joshua Tenenbaum , Leslie Pack Kaelbling , Tomas Lozano-Perez

We study the exploration problem with approximate linear action-value functions in episodic reinforcement learning under the notion of low inherent Bellman error, a condition normally employed to show convergence of approximate value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Andrea Zanette , Alessandro Lazaric , Mykel Kochenderfer , Emma Brunskill

The remarkable success of reinforcement learning (RL) heavily relies on observing the reward of every visited state-action pair. In many real world applications, however, an agent can observe only a score that represents the quality of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Tengyu Xu , Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou , Yingbin Liang

We provide a unified algorithmic framework for ensemble sampling in nonlinear contextual bandits and develop corresponding regret bounds for two most common nonlinear contextual bandit settings: Generalized Linear Ensemble Sampling (GLM-ES)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jiazheng Sun , Weixin Wang , Pan Xu

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), designing precise reward functions remains to be a challenge, particularly when aligning with human intent. Preference-based RL (PbRL) was introduced to address this problem by learning reward models from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Heewoong Choi , Sangwon Jung , Hongjoon Ahn , Taesup Moon

Recent work showed that ML-based attacks on Learning with Errors (LWE), a hard problem used in post-quantum cryptography, outperform classical algebraic attacks in certain settings. Although promising, ML attacks struggle to scale to more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Eshika Saxena , Alberto Alfarano , François Charton , Zeyuan Allen-Zhu , Emily Wenger , Kristin Lauter

Balancing exploration and exploitation is a fundamental part of reinforcement learning, yet most state-of-the-art algorithms use a naive exploration protocol like $\epsilon$-greedy. This contributes to the problem of high sample complexity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Tom Blau , Lionel Ott , Fabio Ramos

In this paper, the causal bandit problem is investigated, with the objective of maximizing the long-term reward by selecting an optimal sequence of interventions on nodes in an unknown causal graph. It is assumed that both the causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Chen Peng , Di Zhang , Urbashi Mitra

We consider the adversarial linear bandits setting and present a unified algorithmic framework that bridges Follow-the-Regularized-Leader (FTRL) and Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader (FTPL) methods, extending the known connection between them…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-13 Lucas Lévy , Jean-Lou Valeau , Arya Akhavan , Patrick Rebeschini

Motivated by models of human decision making proposed to explain commonly observed deviations from conventional expected value preferences, we formulate two stochastic multi-armed bandit problems with distorted probabilities on the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Ravi Kumar Kolla , Prashanth L. A. , Aditya Gopalan , Krishna Jagannathan , Michael Fu , Steve Marcus

We study the linear stochastic bandit problem, relaxing the standard i.i.d. assumption on the observation noise. As an alternative to this restrictive assumption, we allow the noise terms across rounds to be sub-Gaussian but interdependent,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-28 Baptiste Abélès , Eugenio Clerico , Hamish Flynn , Gergely Neu