Related papers: Incentivized Exploration via Filtered Posterior Sa…

Discovering causal relationships requires controlled experiments, but experimentalists face a sequential decision problem: each intervention reveals information that should inform what to try next. Traditional approaches such as random…

Imitation is a key component of human social behavior, and is widely used by both children and adults as a way to navigate uncertain or unfamiliar situations. But in an environment populated by multiple heterogeneous agents pursuing…

We study the problem active sequential hypothesis testing, also known as pure exploration: given a new task, the learner adaptively collects data from the environment to efficiently determine an underlying correct hypothesis. A classical…

Incorporating prior knowledge in reinforcement learning algorithms is mainly an open question. Even when insights about the environment dynamics are available, reinforcement learning is traditionally used in a tabula rasa setting and must…

The explore{exploit dilemma is one of the central challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Bayesian RL solves the dilemma by providing the agent with information in the form of a prior distribution over environments; however, full…

Pimentel et al. (2020) recently analysed probing from an information-theoretic perspective. They argue that probing should be seen as approximating a mutual information. This led to the rather unintuitive conclusion that representations…

Multi-interest learning method for sequential recommendation aims to predict the next item according to user multi-faceted interests given the user historical interactions. Existing methods mainly consist of a multi-interest extractor that…

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely integrated into information retrieval to advance traditional techniques. However, effectively enabling LLMs to seek accurate knowledge in complex tasks remains a challenge due to the complexity…

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"…

Optimizing objective functions subject to constraints is fundamental in many real-world applications. However, these constraints are often not readily defined and must be inferred from expert agent behaviors, a problem known as Inverse…

This paper addresses the exploration-exploitation dilemma inherent in decision-making, focusing on multi-armed bandit problems. The problems involve an agent deciding whether to exploit current knowledge for immediate gains or explore new…

Unsupervised exploration and representation learning become increasingly important when learning in diverse and sparse environments. The information-theoretic principle of empowerment formalizes an unsupervised exploration objective through…

An ideal embodied agent should possess lifelong learning capabilities to handle long-horizon and complex tasks, enabling continuous operation in general environments. This not only requires the agent to accurately accomplish given tasks but…

Model free reinforcement learning suffers from the high sampling complexity inherent to robotic manipulation or locomotion tasks. Most successful approaches typically use random sampling strategies which leads to slow policy convergence. In…

Efficient exploration in bandits is a fundamental online learning problem. We propose a variant of Thompson sampling that learns to explore better as it interacts with bandit instances drawn from an unknown prior. The algorithm meta-learns…

Directed Exploration is a crucial challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), especially when rewards are sparse. Information-directed sampling (IDS), which optimizes the information ratio, seeks to do so by augmenting regret with information…

We consider the problem of sampling from a posterior distribution arising in Bayesian inverse problems in science, engineering, and imaging. Our method belongs to the family of independence Metropolis-Hastings (IMH) sampling algorithms,…

Information theoretic active learning has been widely studied for probabilistic models. For simple regression an optimal myopic policy is easily tractable. However, for other tasks and with more complex models, such as classification with…

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is a powerful paradigm for inferring a reward function from expert demonstrations. Many IRL algorithms require a known transition model and sometimes even a known expert policy, or they at least require…

Information Extraction (IE) aims to extract structural information from unstructured texts. In practice, long-tailed distributions caused by the selection bias of a dataset, may lead to incorrect correlations, also known as spurious…