Related papers: Incentivized Exploration via Filtered Posterior Sa…
Governments around the world aspire to ground decision-making on evidence. Many of the foundations of policy making - e.g. sensing patterns that relate to societal needs, developing evidence-based programs, forecasting potential outcomes of…
We are at the cusp of a transition from "learning from data" to "learning what data to learn from" as a central focus of artificial intelligence (AI) research. While the first-order learning problem is not completely solved, large models…
We study social learning dynamics motivated by reviews on online platforms. The agents collectively follow a simple multi-armed bandit protocol, but each agent acts myopically, without regards to exploration. We allow the greedy…
We consider stochastic multi-armed bandit problems with graph feedback, where the decision maker is allowed to observe the neighboring actions of the chosen action. We allow the graph structure to vary with time and consider both…
Reinforcement learning for embodied agents is a challenging problem. The accumulated reward to be optimized is often a very rugged function, and gradient methods are impaired by many local optimizers. We demonstrate, in an experimental…
The electrical impedance tomography (EIT) problem of estimating the unknown conductivity distribution inside a domain from boundary current or voltage measurements requires the solution of a nonlinear inverse problem. Sparsity promoting…
Imitation learning is a class of promising policy learning algorithms that is free from many practical issues with reinforcement learning, such as the reward design issue and the exploration hardness. However, the current imitation…
Exploration remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning, as many existing methods either lack theoretical guarantees or fall short in practical effectiveness. In this paper, we propose CAE, i.e., the Critic as an Explorer, a…
We consider a team of reinforcement learning agents that concurrently operate in a common environment, and we develop an approach to efficient coordinated exploration that is suitable for problems of practical scale. Our approach builds on…
We present blind exploration and exploitation (BEE) algorithms for identifying the most reliable stochastic expert based on formulations that employ posterior sampling, upper-confidence bounds, empirical Kullback-Leibler divergence, and…
Interactive preference elicitation (IPE) aims to substantially reduce human effort while acquiring human preferences in wide personalization systems. Dueling bandit (DB) algorithms enable optimal decision-making in IPE building on pairwise…
In practice, incentive providers (i.e., principals) often cannot observe the reward realizations of incentivized agents, which is in contrast to many principal-agent models that have been previously studied. This information asymmetry…
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…
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…
Most provably-efficient learning algorithms introduce optimism about poorly-understood states and actions to encourage exploration. We study an alternative approach for efficient exploration, posterior sampling for reinforcement learning…
Learning complex robot behavior through interactions with the environment necessitates principled exploration. Effective strategies should prioritize exploring regions of the state-action space that maximize rewards, with optimistic…
In this paper, we investigate a new multi-armed bandit (MAB) online learning model that considers real-world phenomena in many recommender systems: (i) the learning agent cannot pull the arms by itself and thus has to offer rewards to users…
We propose information-directed sampling -- a new approach to online optimization problems in which a decision-maker must balance between exploration and exploitation while learning from partial feedback. Each action is sampled in a manner…
The famous Policy Iteration algorithm alternates between policy improvement and policy evaluation. Implementations of this algorithm with several variants of the latter evaluation stage, e.g, $n$-step and trace-based returns, have been…
We study incentivized exploration for the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem with non-stationary reward distributions, where players receive compensation for exploring arms other than the greedy choice and may provide biased feedback on the…