English
Related papers

Related papers: Experiment Planning with Function Approximation

200 papers

We consider an online decision making setting known as contextual bandit problem, and propose an approach for improving contextual bandit performance by using an adaptive feature extraction (representation learning) based on online…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Baihan Lin , Djallel Bouneffouf , Guillermo Cecchi , Irina Rish

One obstacle to applying reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world problems is the lack of suitable reward functions. Designing such reward functions is difficult in part because the user only has an implicit understanding of the task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-20 Jan Leike , David Krueger , Tom Everitt , Miljan Martic , Vishal Maini , Shane Legg

Many works have developed no-regret algorithms for contextual bandits with function approximation, where the mean reward function over context-action pairs belongs to a function class. Although there are many approaches to this problem, one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Aldo Pacchiano

We study here the problem of learning the exploration exploitation trade-off in the contextual bandit problem with linear reward function setting. In the traditional algorithms that solve the contextual bandit problem, the exploration is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-06 Djallel Bouneffouf , Emmanuelle Claeys

Embedding models, which learn latent representations of users and items based on user-item interaction patterns, are a key component of recommendation systems. In many applications, contextual constraints need to be applied to refine…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-07-04 Syrine Krichene , Mike Gartrell , Clement Calauzenes

We consider the problem of fitting a reinforcement learning (RL) model to some given behavioral data under a multi-armed bandit environment. These models have received much attention in recent years for characterizing human and animal…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Hao Zhu , Jasper Hoffmann , Baohe Zhang , Joschka Boedecker

We consider the linear contextual multi-class multi-period packing problem (LMMP) where the goal is to pack items such that the total vector of consumption is below a given budget vector and the total value is as large as possible. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-02 Wonyoung Kim , Garud Iyengar , Assaf Zeevi

We study the reward-free reinforcement learning framework, which is particularly suitable for batch reinforcement learning and scenarios where one needs policies for multiple reward functions. This framework has two phases. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Zihan Zhang , Simon S. Du , Xiangyang Ji

Bandit learning is characterized by the tension between long-term exploration and short-term exploitation. However, as has recently been noted, in settings in which the choices of the learning algorithm correspond to important decisions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-11 Sampath Kannan , Jamie Morgenstern , Aaron Roth , Bo Waggoner , Zhiwei Steven Wu

Standard approaches to decision-making under uncertainty focus on sequential exploration of the space of decisions. However, \textit{simultaneously} proposing a batch of decisions, which leverages available resources for parallel…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-07 Jeffrey Chan , Aldo Pacchiano , Nilesh Tripuraneni , Yun S. Song , Peter Bartlett , Michael I. Jordan

Advances in reinforcement learning research have demonstrated the ways in which different agent-based models can learn how to optimally perform a task within a given environment. Reinforcement leaning solves unsupervised problems where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-03 Herkulaas Combrink , Vukosi Marivate , Benjamin Rosman

Modifying the reward-biased maximum likelihood method originally proposed in the adaptive control literature, we propose novel learning algorithms to handle the explore-exploit trade-off in linear bandits problems as well as generalized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-09 Yu-Heng Hung , Ping-Chun Hsieh , Xi Liu , P. R. Kumar

We study contextual bandits in the stochastic i.i.d.\ setting, where a learner observes contexts drawn from an unknown distribution, selects actions from a finite set $A$, and aims to identify an approximately optimal policy from a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Liad Erez , Fan Chen , Alon Cohen , Tomer Koren , Yishay Mansour , Shay Moran , Alexander Rakhlin

In the stochastic knapsack problem, we are given a knapsack of size B, and a set of jobs whose sizes and rewards are drawn from a known probability distribution. However, we know the actual size and reward only when the job completes. How…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2011-02-21 Anupam Gupta , Ravishankar Krishnaswamy , Marco Molinaro , R. Ravi

Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is the workhorse of machine learning, whether for classification and regression or for off-policy policy learning, but its model-agnostic guarantees can fail when we use adaptively collected data, such as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-04 Aurélien Bibaut , Antoine Chambaz , Maria Dimakopoulou , Nathan Kallus , Mark van der Laan

Evolutionary strategies have recently been shown to achieve competing levels of performance for complex optimization problems in reinforcement learning. In such problems, one often needs to optimize an objective function subject to a set of…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-02-23 Youssef Diouane , Aurelien Lucchi , Vihang Patil

We study the problem of estimating the expected reward of the optimal policy in the stochastic disjoint linear bandit setting. We prove that for certain settings it is possible to obtain an accurate estimate of the optimal policy value even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-17 Weihao Kong , Gregory Valiant , Emma Brunskill

Given n experiment subjects with potentially heterogeneous covariates and two possible treatments, namely active treatment and control, this paper addresses the fundamental question of determining the optimal accuracy in estimating the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-13 Jiachun Li , David Simchi-Levi , Yunxiao Zhao

The staggering feats of AI systems have brought to attention the topic of AI Alignment: aligning a "superintelligent" AI agent's actions with humanity's interests. Many existing frameworks/algorithms in alignment study the problem on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Hong Jun Jeon , Benjamin Van Roy

We study decision making in environments where the reward is only partially observed, but can be modeled as a function of an action and an observed context. This setting, known as contextual bandits, encompasses a wide variety of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-05-09 Miroslav Dudik , John Langford , Lihong Li