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Machine learning algorithms frequently require careful tuning of model hyperparameters, regularization terms, and optimization parameters. Unfortunately, this tuning is often a "black art" that requires expert experience, unwritten rules of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2012-08-30 Jasper Snoek , Hugo Larochelle , Ryan P. Adams

Neural Processes (NPs; Garnelo et al., 2018a,b) are a rich class of models for meta-learning that map data sets directly to predictive stochastic processes. We provide a rigorous analysis of the standard maximum-likelihood objective used to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-12 Wessel P. Bruinsma , James Requeima , Andrew Y. K. Foong , Jonathan Gordon , Richard E. Turner

Estimating consumer preferences is central to many problems in economics and marketing. This paper develops a flexible framework for learning individual preferences from partial ranking information by interpreting observed rankings as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-19 Yu-Chang Chen , Chen Chian Fuh , Shang En Tsai

Preference-based reward learning is a popular technique for teaching robots and autonomous systems how a human user wants them to perform a task. Previous works have shown that actively synthesizing preference queries to maximize…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Evan Ellis , Gaurav R. Ghosal , Stuart J. Russell , Anca Dragan , Erdem Bıyık

We investigate a learning decision support system for vehicle routing, where the routing engine learns implicit preferences that human planners have when manually creating route plans (or routings). The goal is to use these learned…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-01-12 Rocsildes Canoy , Víctor Bucarey , Jayanta Mandi , Tias Guns

Affordances are fundamental descriptors of relationships between actions, objects and effects. They provide the means whereby a robot can predict effects, recognize actions, select objects and plan its behavior according to desired goals.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Pedro Osório , Alexandre Bernardino , Ruben Martinez-Cantin , José Santos-Victor

Reward modelling from preference data is a crucial step in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, requiring robust generalisation to novel prompt-response pairs. In this work, we propose to frame this problem in a causal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Katarzyna Kobalczyk , Mihaela van der Schaar

We study active preference learning as a framework for intuitively specifying the behaviour of autonomous robots. In active preference learning, a user chooses the preferred behaviour from a set of alternatives, from which the robot learns…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-09-30 Nils Wilde , Dana Kulic , Stephen L. Smith

Recommender systems can automatically recommend users with items that they probably like. The goal of them is to model the user-item interaction by effectively representing the users and items. Existing methods have primarily learned the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Xue Dong , Xuemeng Song , Na Zheng , Yinwei Wei , Zhongzhou Zhao

For a learning task, Gaussian process (GP) is interested in learning the statistical relationship between inputs and outputs, since it offers not only the prediction mean but also the associated variability. The vanilla GP however struggles…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-01 Haitao Liu , Yew-Soon Ong , Xiaomo Jiang , Xiaofang Wang

Gaussian Processes (GPs) are widely employed in control and learning because of their principled treatment of uncertainty. However, tracking uncertainty for iterative, multi-step predictions in general leads to an analytically intractable…

Trajectory planning for automated vehicles commonly employs optimization over a moving horizon - Model Predictive Control - where the cost function critically influences the resulting driving style. However, finding a suitable cost function…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-20 Lukas Theiner , Sebastian Hirt , Alexander Steinke , Rolf Findeisen

Decision-making problems often feature uncertainty stemming from heterogeneous and context-dependent human preferences. To address this, we propose a sequential learning-and-optimization pipeline to learn preference distributions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Benjamin Hudson , Laurent Charlin , Emma Frejinger

Gaussian process regression is a popular Bayesian framework for surrogate modeling of expensive data sources. As part of a broader effort in scientific machine learning, many recent works have incorporated physical constraints or other a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-07 Laura Swiler , Mamikon Gulian , Ari Frankel , Cosmin Safta , John Jakeman

Choice modeling has been a central topic in the study of individual preference or utility across many fields including economics, marketing, operations research, and psychology. While the vast majority of the literature on choice models has…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-08-22 Zhongze Cai , Hanzhao Wang , Kalyan Talluri , Xiaocheng Li

The accurate prediction of time-changing variances is an important task in the modeling of financial data. Standard econometric models are often limited as they assume rigid functional relationships for the variances. Moreover, function…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-02-14 Yue Wu , Jose Miguel Hernandez Lobato , Zoubin Ghahramani

Can large language models (LLMs) learn a decision maker's preferences from observed choices and generate preference-consistent recommendations in new situations? We propose a portable Simulate-Recommend-Evaluate framework that tests…

General Economics · Economics 2026-04-08 Jeongbin Kim , Matthew Kovach , Kyu-Min Lee , Euncheol Shin , Hector Tzavellas

We consider the problem of learning the preferences of a heterogeneous population by observing choices from an assortment of products, ads, or other offerings. Our observation model takes a form common in assortment planning applications:…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-09 Nathan Kallus , Madeleine Udell

Preference-based optimization algorithms are iterative procedures that seek the optimal calibration of a decision vector based only on comparisons between couples of different tunings. At each iteration, a human decision-maker expresses a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-03 Davide Previtali , Mirko Mazzoleni , Antonio Ferramosca , Fabio Previdi

Gaussian processes (GPs) are a mature and widely-used component of the ML toolbox. One of their desirable qualities is automatic hyperparameter selection, which allows for training without user intervention. However, in many realistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Sebastian W. Ober , Artem Artemev , Marcel Wagenländer , Rudolfs Grobins , Mark van der Wilk