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Minimax risk and regret focus on expectation, missing rare failures critical in safety-critical bandits and reinforcement learning. Minimax quantiles capture these tails. Three strands of prior work motivate this study: minimax-quantile…
A fundamental challenge in interactive learning and decision making, ranging from bandit problems to reinforcement learning, is to provide sample-efficient, adaptive learning algorithms that achieve near-optimal regret. This question is…
Past research on interactive decision making problems (bandits, reinforcement learning, etc.) mostly focuses on the minimax regret that measures the algorithm's performance on the hardest instance. However, an ideal algorithm should adapt…
Interactive statistical decision making (ISDM) features algorithm-dependent data generated through interaction. Existing information-theoretic lower bounds in ISDM largely target expected risk, while tail-sensitive objectives are less…
A foundational problem in reinforcement learning and interactive decision making is to understand what modeling assumptions lead to sample-efficient learning guarantees, and what algorithm design principles achieve optimal sample…
We consider the problem of estimating the underlying graph associated with a Markov random field, with the added twist that the decoding algorithm can iteratively choose which subsets of nodes to sample based on the previous samples,…
Information theory provides tools to predict the performance of a learning algorithm on a given dataset. For instance, the accuracy of learning an unknown parameter can be upper bounded by reducing the learning task to hypothesis testing…
We propose a novel technique for analyzing adaptive sampling called the {\em Simulator}. Our approach differs from the existing methods by considering not how much information could be gathered by any fixed sampling strategy, but how…
We consider the problem of contextual bandits and imitation learning, where the learner lacks direct knowledge of the executed action's reward. Instead, the learner can actively query an expert at each round to compare two actions and…
We study the problem of dynamic batch learning in high-dimensional sparse linear contextual bandits, where a decision maker, under a given maximum-number-of-batch constraint and only able to observe rewards at the end of each batch, can…
We consider distributed parameter estimation using interactive protocols subject to local information constraints such as bandwidth limitations, local differential privacy, and restricted measurements. We provide a unified framework…
We consider the problem of interactive decision making, encompassing structured bandits and reinforcement learning with general function approximation. Recently, Foster et al. (2021) introduced the Decision-Estimation Coefficient, a measure…
We study sequential decision-making with known rewards and unknown constraints, motivated by situations where the constraints represent expensive-to-evaluate human preferences, such as safe and comfortable driving behavior. We formalize the…
We consider the development of adaptive, instance-dependent algorithms for interactive decision making (bandits, reinforcement learning, and beyond) that, rather than only performing well in the worst case, adapt to favorable properties of…
Stochastic high dimensional bandit problems with low dimensional structures are useful in different applications such as online advertising and drug discovery. In this work, we propose a simple unified algorithm for such problems and…
We introduce a latency-aware contextual bandit framework that generalizes the standard contextual bandit problem, where the learner adaptively selects arms and switches decision sets under action delays. In this setting, the learner…
Modern systems, such as digital platforms and service systems, increasingly rely on contextual bandits for online decision-making; however, their deployment can inadvertently create unfair exposure among arms, undermining long-term platform…
The stochastic multi-armed bandit model is a simple abstraction that has proven useful in many different contexts in statistics and machine learning. Whereas the achievable limit in terms of regret minimization is now well known, our aim is…
We introduce the cram method as a general statistical framework for evaluating the final learned policy from a multi-armed contextual bandit algorithm, using the dataset generated by the same bandit algorithm. The proposed on-policy…
Contextual online decision-making problems with constraints appear in a wide range of real-world applications, such as adaptive experimental design under safety constraints, personalized recommendation with resource limits, and dynamic…