Related papers: Experiment Planning with Function Approximation
Psychological research shows that enjoyment of many goods is subject to satiation, with short-term satisfaction declining after repeated exposures to the same item. Nevertheless, proposed algorithms for powering recommender systems seldom…
We study the problem of online learning in adversarial bandit problems under a partial observability model called off-policy feedback. In this sequential decision making problem, the learner cannot directly observe its rewards, but instead…
Robust Policy Search is the problem of learning policies that do not degrade in performance when subject to unseen environment model parameters. It is particularly relevant for transferring policies learned in a simulation environment to…
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…
Most learning to rank research has assumed that the utility of different documents is independent, which results in learned ranking functions that return redundant results. The few approaches that avoid this have rather unsatisfyingly…
The goal of imitation learning is to mimic expert behavior from demonstrations, without access to an explicit reward signal. A popular class of approach infers the (unknown) reward function via inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) followed…
This paper studies systematic exploration for reinforcement learning with rich observations and function approximation. We introduce a new model called contextual decision processes, that unifies and generalizes most prior settings. Our…
Contextual bandit algorithms have transformed modern experimentation by enabling real-time adaptation for personalized treatment and efficient use of data. Yet these advantages create challenges for statistical inference due to adaptivity.…
A contextual bandit problem is studied in a highly non-stationary environment, which is ubiquitous in various recommender systems due to the time-varying interests of users. Two models with disjoint and hybrid payoffs are considered to…
We propose a function-learning methodology with a control-theoretical foundation. We parametrise the approximating function as the solution to a control system on a reproducing-kernel Hilbert space, and propose several methods to find the…
Collaborative bandit learning, i.e., bandit algorithms that utilize collaborative filtering techniques to improve sample efficiency in online interactive recommendation, has attracted much research attention as it enjoys the best of both…
One of the questions that arises when designing models that learn to solve multiple tasks simultaneously is how much of the available training budget should be devoted to each individual task. We refer to any formalized approach to…
We study reward design strategies for incentivizing a reinforcement learning agent to adopt a policy from a set of admissible policies. The goal of the reward designer is to modify the underlying reward function cost-efficiently while…
We consider a multi-armed bandit problem with $M$ latent contexts, where an agent interacts with the environment for an episode of $H$ time steps. Depending on the length of the episode, the learner may not be able to estimate accurately…
Discounted reinforcement learning is fundamentally incompatible with function approximation for control in continuing tasks. It is not an optimization problem in its usual formulation, so when using function approximation there is no…
We study two model selection settings in stochastic linear bandits (LB). In the first setting, which we refer to as feature selection, the expected reward of the LB problem is in the linear span of at least one of $M$ feature maps (models).…
Recommender systems are a ubiquitous feature of online platforms. Increasingly, they are explicitly tasked with increasing users' long-term satisfaction. In this context, we study a content exploration task, which we formalize as a…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…
Data that is gathered adaptively --- via bandit algorithms, for example --- exhibits bias. This is true both when gathering simple numeric valued data --- the empirical means kept track of by stochastic bandit algorithms are biased…
We consider the problem of imitation learning under misspecification: settings where the learner is fundamentally unable to replicate expert behavior everywhere. This is often true in practice due to differences in observation space and…