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Related papers: Pure Exploration with Feedback Graphs

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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…

In performative prediction, the deployment of a predictive model triggers a shift in the data distribution. As these shifts are typically unknown ahead of time, the learner needs to deploy a model to get feedback about the distribution it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Meena Jagadeesan , Tijana Zrnic , Celestine Mendler-Dünner

In this paper, we study the non-asymptotic sample complexity for the pure exploration problem in contextual bandits and tabular reinforcement learning (RL): identifying an epsilon-optimal policy from a set of policies with high probability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Adhyyan Narang , Andrew Wagenmaker , Lillian Ratliff , Kevin Jamieson

In this work, we address the challenge of data-efficient exploration in reinforcement learning by examining existing principled, information-theoretic approaches to intrinsic motivation. Specifically, we focus on a class of exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Alberto Caron , Chris Hicks , Vasilios Mavroudis

We study a number of graph exploration problems in the following natural scenario: an algorithm starts exploring an undirected graph from some seed node; the algorithm, for an arbitrary node $v$ that it is aware of, can ask an oracle to…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-10-25 Flavio Chierichetti , Shahrzad Haddadan

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RF-RL), a recently introduced RL paradigm, relies on random action-taking to explore the unknown environment without any reward feedback information. While the primary goal of the exploration phase in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-23 Ruiquan Huang , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

Pure exploration in episodic Reinforcement Learning has primarily focused on Best Policy Identification (BPI), which seeks to identify a (near)-optimal policy with high confidence. Motivated by practical settings where a ``good enough''…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Zitian Li , Wang Chi Cheung

Combinatorial bandits with semi-bandit feedback generalize multi-armed bandits, where the agent chooses sets of arms and observes a noisy reward for each arm contained in the chosen set. The action set satisfies a given structure such as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-22 Marc Jourdan , Mojmír Mutný , Johannes Kirschner , Andreas Krause

In this paper, we investigate a problem of actively learning threshold in latent space, where the unknown reward $g(\gamma, v)$ depends on the proposed threshold $\gamma$ and latent value $v$ and it can be $only$ achieved if the threshold…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-11 Jiahao Zhang , Tao Lin , Weiqiang Zheng , Zhe Feng , Yifeng Teng , Xiaotie Deng

We study episodic reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes when the agent receives additional feedback per step in the form of several transition observations. Such additional observations are available in a range of tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-11 Christoph Dann , Yishay Mansour , Mehryar Mohri , Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan

We consider an online decision-making problem with a reward function defined over graph-structured data. We formally formulate the problem as an instance of graph action bandit. We then propose \texttt{GNN-TS}, a Graph Neural Network (GNN)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Shuang Wu , Arash A. Amini

We study the interplay between communication and feedback in a cooperative online learning setting, where a network of communicating agents learn a common sequential decision-making task through a feedback graph. We bound the network regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Tommaso R. Cesari , Riccardo Della Vecchia

We consider contextual bandits with graph feedback, a class of interactive learning problems with richer structures than vanilla contextual bandits, where taking an action reveals the rewards for all neighboring actions in the feedback…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-08 Yuxiao Wen , Yanjun Han , Zhengyuan Zhou

Moving an autonomous agent through an unknown environment is one of the crucial problems for robotics and network analysis. Therefore, it received a lot of attention in the last decades and was analyzed in many different settings. The graph…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2018-04-23 Hans-Joachim Böckenhauer , Janosch Fuchs , Walter Unger

We derive upper and lower bounds for the policy regret of $T$-round online learning problems with graph-structured feedback, where the adversary is nonoblivious but assumed to have a bounded memory. We obtain upper bounds of $\widetilde…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-03 Zhili Feng , Po-Ling Loh

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-10 Daniel Russo , Benjamin Van Roy

We study how to adapt to smoothly-varying ('easy') environments in well-known online learning problems where acquiring information is expensive. For the problem of label efficient prediction, which is a budgeted version of prediction with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-09 Siddharth Mitra , Aditya Gopalan

We present the first regret bound for classical online Q-learning in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs), without relying on optimism or bonus terms. We first analyze Boltzmann Q-learning with decaying temperature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Rahul Singh , Siddharth Chandak , Eric Moulines , Vivek S. Borkar , Nicholas Bambos

In this work, we improve on the upper and lower bounds for the regret of online learning with strongly observable undirected feedback graphs. The best known upper bound for this problem is $\mathcal{O}\bigl(\sqrt{\alpha T\ln K}\bigr)$,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Khaled Eldowa , Emmanuel Esposito , Tommaso Cesari , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

How to obtain a graph from data samples is an important problem in graph signal processing. One way to formulate this graph learning problem is based on Gaussian maximum likelihood estimation, possibly under particular topology constraints.…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2017-11-02 Keng-Shih Lu , Antonio Ortega