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Related papers: In-Context Learning for Pure Exploration

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In-context learning \ -- performing tasks based on examples given in the prompt \ -- is an important capability that has emerged in large language models and has received significant attention in both theory and practice. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Ruomin Huang , Eshaan Nichani , Jason D. Lee , Rong Ge

We study the problem of invariant learning when the environment labels are unknown. We focus on the invariant representation notion when the Bayes optimal conditional label distribution is the same across different environments. Previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-09 Aayush Mishra , Anqi Liu

The in-context learning paradigm with LLMs has been instrumental in advancing a wide range of natural language processing tasks. The selection of few-shot examples (exemplars / demonstration samples) is essential for constructing effective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Kiran Purohit , V Venktesh , Sourangshu Bhattacharya , Avishek Anand

Pre-trained transformers exhibit the capability of adapting to new tasks through in-context learning (ICL), where they efficiently utilize a limited set of prompts without explicit model optimization. The canonical communication problem of…

We study batched bandit experiments and consider the problem of inference conditional on the realized stopping time, assignment probabilities, and target parameter, where all of these may be chosen adaptively using information up to the…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-21 Jiafeng Chen , Isaiah Andrews

We study the real-valued combinatorial pure exploration problem in the stochastic multi-armed bandit (R-CPE-MAB). We study the case where the size of the action set is polynomial with respect to the number of arms. In such a case, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-10 Shintaro Nakamura , Masashi Sugiyama

A key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) is environment generalization: a policy trained to solve a task in one environment often fails to solve the same task in a slightly different test environment. A common approach to improve…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-07-30 Wenxuan Zhou , Lerrel Pinto , Abhinav Gupta

This paper considers the problem of efficient exploration of unseen environments, a key challenge in AI. We propose a `learning to explore' framework where we learn a policy from a distribution of environments. At test time, presented with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Hanjun Dai , Yujia Li , Chenglong Wang , Rishabh Singh , Po-Sen Huang , Pushmeet Kohli

We study the initial beam acquisition problem in millimeter wave (mm-wave) networks from the perspective of best arm identification in multi-armed bandits (MABs). For the stationary environment, we propose a novel algorithm called…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Gourab Ghatak

We study the phenomenon of \textit{in-context learning} (ICL) exhibited by large language models, where they can adapt to a new learning task, given a handful of labeled examples, without any explicit parameter optimization. Our goal is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Jacob Abernethy , Alekh Agarwal , Teodor V. Marinov , Manfred K. Warmuth

In robotics, diffusion models can capture multi-modal trajectories from demonstrations, making them a transformative approach in imitation learning. However, achieving optimal performance following this regiment requires a large-scale…

Self-attention based Transformer has demonstrated the state-of-the-art performances in a number of natural language processing tasks. Self-attention is able to model long-term dependencies, but it may suffer from the extraction of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-12-30 Guangxiang Zhao , Junyang Lin , Zhiyuan Zhang , Xuancheng Ren , Qi Su , Xu Sun

Realistic environments often provide agents with very limited feedback. When the environment is initially unknown, the feedback, in the beginning, can be completely absent, and the agents may first choose to devote all their effort on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Pierre Ménard , Omar Darwiche Domingues , Anders Jonsson , Emilie Kaufmann , Edouard Leurent , Michal Valko

Effective and intelligent exploration has been an unresolved problem for reinforcement learning. Most contemporary reinforcement learning relies on simple heuristic strategies such as $\epsilon$-greedy exploration or adding Gaussian noise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Muhammad Usama , Dong Eui Chang

Preference-based Pure Exploration (PrePEx) aims to identify with a given confidence level the set of Pareto optimal arms in a vector-valued (aka multi-objective) bandit, where the reward vectors are ordered via a (given) preference cone…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Udvas Das , Apurv Shukla , Debabrota Basu

In this paper, a concurrent learning framework is developed for source search in an unknown environment using autonomous platforms equipped with onboard sensors. Distinct from the existing solutions that require significant computational…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-03-13 Zhongguo Li , Wen-Hua Chen , Jun Yang

This paper develops a finite-sample statistical theory for in-context learning (ICL), analyzed within a meta-learning framework that accommodates mixtures of diverse task types. We introduce a principled risk decomposition that separates…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-09 Tomoya Wakayama , Taiji Suzuki

Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning, particularly in environments where external rewards are sparse. Here we focus on exploration with intrinsic rewards, where the agent transiently augments the external rewards with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Changmin Yu , Neil Burgess , Maneesh Sahani , Samuel J. Gershman

Large autoregressive models like Transformers can solve tasks through in-context learning (ICL) without learning new weights, suggesting avenues for efficiently solving new tasks. For many tasks, e.g., linear regression, the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Sarthak Mittal , Eric Elmoznino , Leo Gagnon , Sangnie Bhardwaj , Tom Marty , Dhanya Sridhar , Guillaume Lajoie

In-context learning (ICL) derives its power from enabling Large Language Models to adapt to new tasks via prompt-based reasoning alone, entirely bypassing the need for parameter updates. Existing theories primarily study ICL in single-task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Guangyu Li , Meng Ding , Lijie Hu