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Related papers: Experiment Planning with Function Approximation

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Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated tremendous empirical success across numerous challenging domains. However, we lack a strong theoretical understanding of the statistical complexity of RL in environments with large state spaces,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Gene Li

Recently, there has been remarkable progress in reinforcement learning (RL) with general function approximation. However, all these works only provide regret or sample complexity guarantees. It is still an open question if one can achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Yue Wu , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

Decision-makers often simultaneously face many related but heterogeneous learning problems. For instance, a large retailer may wish to learn product demand at different stores to solve pricing or inventory problems, making it desirable to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-30 Kan Xu , Hamsa Bastani

The correct specification of reward models is a well-known challenge in reinforcement learning. Hand-crafted reward functions often lead to inefficient or suboptimal policies and may not be aligned with user values. Reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Muhan Lin , Shuyang Shi , Yue Guo , Behdad Chalaki , Vaishnav Tadiparthi , Ehsan Moradi Pari , Simon Stepputtis , Joseph Campbell , Katia Sycara

We study the fundamental limits of learning in contextual bandits, where a learner's rewards depend on their actions and a known context, which extends the canonical multi-armed bandit to the case where side-information is available. We are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-13 Moise Blanchard , Steve Hanneke , Patrick Jaillet

Contextual bandits are canonical models for sequential decision-making under uncertainty in environments with time-varying components. In this setting, the expected reward of each bandit arm consists of the inner product of an unknown…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-05-27 Hongju Park , Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh

In imitation learning, an agent learns how to behave in an environment with an unknown cost function by mimicking expert demonstrations. Existing imitation learning algorithms typically involve solving a sequence of planning or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-17 Jonathan Ho , Jayesh K. Gupta , Stefano Ermon

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Tsung-Yen Yang , Justinian Rosca , Karthik Narasimhan , Peter J. Ramadge

Reinforcement learning in cooperative multi-agent settings has recently advanced significantly in its scope, with applications in cooperative estimation for advertising, dynamic treatment regimes, distributed control, and federated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Abhimanyu Dubey , Alex Pentland

We study batched bandit experiments and consider the problem of inference conditional on the realized stopping time, assignment probabilities, and target parameter, where all of these may be chosen adaptively using information up to the…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-21 Jiafeng Chen , Isaiah Andrews

It has been shown (Amuru et al. 2015) that online learning algorithms can be effectively used to select optimal physical layer parameters for jamming against digital modulation schemes without a priori knowledge of the victim's transmission…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-07 Charles E. Thornton , R. Michael Buehrer

In this paper, we study the problem of estimating uniformly well the mean values of several distributions given a finite budget of samples. If the variance of the distributions were known, one could design an optimal sampling strategy by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-17 Alexandra Carpentier , Alessandro Lazaric , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Rémi Munos , Peter Auer , András Antos

We study the piecewise constant bandit problem where the expected reward is a piecewise constant function with one change point (discontinuity) across the action space $[0,1]$ and the learner's aim is to locate the change point. Under the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-23 Joseph Lazzaro , Ciara Pike-Burke

In this work, we develop linear bandit algorithms that automatically adapt to different environments. By plugging a novel loss estimator into the optimization problem that characterizes the instance-optimal strategy, our first algorithm not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Chung-Wei Lee , Haipeng Luo , Chen-Yu Wei , Mengxiao Zhang , Xiaojin Zhang

A central problem in sequential decision making is to develop algorithms that are practical and computationally efficient, yet support the use of flexible, general-purpose models. Focusing on the contextual bandit problem, recent progress…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Yinglun Zhu , Dylan J. Foster , John Langford , Paul Mineiro

Multi-armed bandit algorithms have become a reference solution for handling the explore/exploit dilemma in recommender systems, and many other important real-world problems, such as display advertisement. However, such algorithms usually…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-25 Qingyun Wu , Naveen Iyer , Hongning Wang

In an attempt to make algorithms fair, the machine learning literature has largely focused on equalizing decisions, outcomes, or error rates across race or gender groups. To illustrate, consider a hypothetical government rideshare program…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-14 Alex Chohlas-Wood , Madison Coots , Henry Zhu , Emma Brunskill , Sharad Goel

Reinforcement learning has emerged as an important approach for autonomous driving. A reward function is used in reinforcement learning to establish the learned skill objectives and guide the agent toward the optimal policy. Since…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Ahmed Abouelazm , Jonas Michel , J. Marius Zoellner

Models based on approximation capabilities have recently been studied in the context of Optimal Recovery. These models, however, are not compatible with overparametrization, since model- and data-consistent functions could then be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-04-02 Simon Foucart

We consider a stochastic optimization problem involving two random variables: a context variable $X$ and a dependent variable $Y$. The objective is to minimize the expected value of a nonlinear loss functional applied to the conditional…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-16 Noel Smith , Andrzej Ruszczynski