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Evolution is a fundamental process that shapes the biological world we inhabit, and reinforcement learning is a powerful tool used in artificial intelligence to develop intelligent agents that learn from their environment. In recent years,…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-06-19 Taboubi Ahmed

We present and study a partial-information model of online learning, where a decision maker repeatedly chooses from a finite set of actions, and observes some subset of the associated losses. This naturally models several situations where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-10-01 Noga Alon , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Claudio Gentile , Shie Mannor , Yishay Mansour , Ohad Shamir

This paper proposes an online tree-based Bayesian approach for reinforcement learning. For inference, we employ a generalised context tree model. This defines a distribution on multivariate Gaussian piecewise-linear models, which can be…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-05-05 Nikolaos Tziortziotis , Christos Dimitrakakis , Konstantinos Blekas

We study the evolution of information in interactive decision making through the lens of a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem. Focusing on a fundamental example where a unique optimal arm outperforms the rest by a fixed margin, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-23 Yuzhou Gu , Yanjun Han , Jian Qian

Real-world applications of reinforcement learning for recommendation and experimentation faces a practical challenge: the relative reward of different bandit arms can evolve over the lifetime of the learning agent. To deal with these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-29 Srivas Chennu , Andrew Maher , Jamie Martin , Subash Prabanantham

Complex learning agents are increasingly deployed alongside existing experts, such as human operators or previously trained agents. However, it remains unclear how should learners optimally incorporate certain forms of expert data, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Daniel Jarne Ornia , Joel Dyer , Nicholas Bishop , Anisoara Calinescu , Michael Wooldridge

Real-world applications of reinforcement learning often involve environments where agents operate on complex, high-dimensional observations, but the underlying (''latent'') dynamics are comparatively simple. However, outside of restrictive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Philip Amortila , Dylan J. Foster , Nan Jiang , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Zakaria Mhammedi

This paper addresses the problem of maintaining safety during training in Reinforcement Learning (RL), such that the safety constraint violations are bounded at any point during learning. In a variety of RL applications the safety of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Rohan Mitta , Hosein Hasanbeig , Jun Wang , Daniel Kroening , Yiannis Kantaros , Alessandro Abate

Coping with ambiguous questions has been a perennial problem in real-world dialogue systems. Although clarification by asking questions is a common form of human interaction, it is hard to define appropriate questions to elicit more…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-12-18 Xiang Hu , Zujie Wen , Yafang Wang , Xiaolong Li , Gerard de Melo

Foundation models contain a wealth of information from their vast number of training samples. However, most prior arts fail to extract this information in a precise and efficient way for small sample sizes. In this work, we propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-26 Nico Schiavone , Xingyu Li

In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, instance-dependent algorithms attain improved performance on "easy" problems with a gap between the best and second-best arm. Are similar guarantees possible for contextual bandits? While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin , David Simchi-Levi , Yunzong Xu

This paper studies bandit problems where an agent has access to offline data that might be utilized to potentially improve the estimation of each arm's reward distribution. A major obstacle in this setting is the existence of compound…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-21 Wen Huang , Xintao Wu

Intelligent systems have the ability to improve their behaviour over time taking observations, experiences or explicit feedback into account. Traditional approaches separate the learning problem and make isolated use of techniques from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-12 Simon Reichhuber , Sven Tomforde

Several researchers have recently investigated the connection between reinforcement learning and classification. We are motivated by proposals of approximate policy iteration schemes without value functions which focus on policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2008-07-06 Christos Dimitrakakis , Michail G. Lagoudakis

Contextual bandit learning is a reinforcement learning problem where the learner repeatedly receives a set of features (context), takes an action and receives a reward based on the action and context. We consider this problem under a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-05 Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudík , Satyen Kale , John Langford , Robert E. Schapire

We develop a general theory to optimize the frequentist regret for sequential learning problems, where efficient bandit and reinforcement learning algorithms can be derived from unified Bayesian principles. We propose a novel optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Yunbei Xu , Assaf Zeevi

We develop a novel framework of bounded rationality under cognitive frictions that studies learning over optimal behavior through both deliberative reasoning and accumulated experiences. Using both types of information, agents engage in…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-03-28 Cosmin Ilut , Rosen Valchev

Generalization to out of distribution tasks in reinforcement learning is a challenging problem. One successful approach improves generalization by conditioning policies on task or environment descriptions that provide information about the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-27 Kolby Nottingham , Alekhya Pyla , Sameer Singh , Roy Fox

Learning agents that excel at sequential decision-making tasks must continuously resolve the problem of exploration and exploitation for optimal learning. However, such interactions with the environment online might be prohibitively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Ambedkar Dukkipati , Ranga Shaarad Ayyagari , Bodhisattwa Dasgupta , Parag Dutta , Prabhas Reddy Onteru

The Exploration-Exploitation tradeoff arises in Reinforcement Learning when one cannot tell if a policy is optimal. Then, there is a constant need to explore new actions instead of exploiting past experience. In practice, it is common to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Lior Shani , Yonathan Efroni , Shie Mannor