Related papers: Near-Linear MIR Algorithms for Stochastically-Orde…
The celebrated multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory models the basic trade-off between exploration, or learning about the state of a system, and exploitation, or utilizing the system. In this paper we study the variant of the…
We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation for reinforcement learning, where the goal is to estimate the expected reward of a target policy $\pi$ using offline data collected by running a logging policy $\mu$. Standard…
Many real-world problems like Social Influence Maximization face the dilemma of choosing the best $K$ out of $N$ options at a given time instant. This setup can be modeled as a combinatorial bandit which chooses $K$ out of $N$ arms at each…
During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…
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…
We consider a social planner faced with a stream of myopic selfish agents. The goal of the social planner is to maximize the social welfare, however, it is limited to using only information asymmetry (regarding previous outcomes) and cannot…
We study an online stochastic matching problem in which an algorithm sequentially matches $U$ users to $K$ arms, aiming to maximize cumulative reward over $T$ rounds under budget constraints. Without structural assumptions, computing the…
We study safe reinforcement learning in finite-horizon linear mixture constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with adversarial rewards under full-information feedback and an unknown transition kernel. We propose a primal-dual policy…
Motivated by models of human decision making proposed to explain commonly observed deviations from conventional expected value preferences, we formulate two stochastic multi-armed bandit problems with distorted probabilities on the reward…
While experimental design often focuses on selecting the single best alternative from a finite set (e.g., in ranking and selection or best-arm identification), many pure-exploration problems pursue richer goals. Given a specific goal,…
We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) with linear MDPs under the infinite-horizon discounted setting which aims to learn a policy that maximizes the expected discounted cumulative reward using a pre-collected dataset. Existing…
Sequential decision tasks with incomplete information are characterized by the exploration problem; namely the trade-off between further exploration for learning more about the environment and immediate exploitation of the accrued…
In order to solve partial differential equations numerically and accurately, a high order spatial discretization is usually needed. Model order reduction (MOR) techniques are often used to reduce the order of spatially-discretized systems…
We study Online Linear Programming (OLP) with batching. The planning horizon is cut into $K$ batches, and the decisions on customers arriving within a batch can be delayed to the end of their associated batch. Compared with OLP without…
We consider stochastic bandit problems with a continuous set of arms and where the expected reward is a continuous and unimodal function of the arm. No further assumption is made regarding the smoothness and the structure of the expected…
We are interested in risk constraints for infinite horizon discrete time Markov decision processes (MDPs). Starting with average reward MDPs, we show that increasing concave stochastic dominance constraints on the empirical distribution of…
This paper focuses on selecting the arm with the highest variance from a set of $K$ independent arms. Specifically, we focus on two settings: (i) misallocation minimization setting, that penalizes the number of pulls of suboptimal arms in…
We study the multi-armed bandit problem with arms which are Markov chains with rewards. In the finite-horizon setting, the celebrated Gittins indices do not apply, and the exact solution is intractable. We provide approximation algorithms…
We consider the task of estimating a structural model of dynamic decisions by a human agent based upon the observable history of implemented actions and visited states. This problem has an inherent nested structure: in the inner problem, an…
Bayesian Reinforcement Learning (RL) is capable of not only incorporating domain knowledge, but also solving the exploration-exploitation dilemma in a natural way. As Bayesian RL is intractable except for special cases, previous work has…