Related papers: Optimization of Epsilon-Greedy Exploration
Current music recommender systems typically act in a greedy fashion by recommending songs with the highest user ratings. Greedy recommendation, however, is suboptimal over the long term: it does not actively gather information on user…
Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for those tasks where rewards from environments are sparse. A commonly used approach for exploring such environments is to introduce some "intrinsic"…
Bayesian optimization is normally performed within fixed variable bounds. In cases like hyperparameter tuning for machine learning algorithms, setting the variable bounds is not trivial. It is hard to guarantee that any fixed bounds will…
Bayesian optimization offers the possibility of optimizing black-box operations not accessible through traditional techniques. The success of Bayesian optimization methods such as Expected Improvement (EI) are significantly affected by the…
I describe a framework for adaptive scientific exploration based on iterating an Observation--Inference--Design cycle that allows adjustment of hypotheses and observing protocols in response to the results of observation on-the-fly, as data…
We address the challenge of exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) when the agent operates in an unknown environment with sparse or no rewards. In this work, we study the maximum entropy exploration problem of two different types. The…
Bayesian optimisation is a popular, surrogate model-based approach for optimising expensive black-box functions. Given a surrogate model, the next location to expensively evaluate is chosen via maximisation of a cheap-to-query acquisition…
Bandit learning is characterized by the tension between long-term exploration and short-term exploitation. However, as has recently been noted, in settings in which the choices of the learning algorithm correspond to important decisions…
Recommender systems play a crucial role in internet economies by connecting users with relevant products. However, designing effective recommender systems faces the key challenges: the exploration-exploitation tradeoff in securing incentive…
In this paper we prove the efficacy of a simple greedy algorithm for a finite horizon online resource allocation/matching problem, when the corresponding static planning linear program (SPP) exhibits a non-degeneracy condition called the…
Within the framework of probably approximately correct Markov decision processes (PAC-MDP), much theoretical work has focused on methods to attain near optimality after a relatively long period of learning and exploration. However,…
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…
Recommender systems are widely used to suggest engaging content, and Large Language Models (LLMs) have given rise to generative recommenders. Such systems can directly generate items, including for open-set tasks like question suggestion.…
Modern data is messy and high-dimensional, and it is often not clear a priori what are the right questions to ask. Instead, the analyst typically needs to use the data to search for interesting analyses to perform and hypotheses to test.…
In retail, there are predictable yet dramatic time-dependent patterns in customer behavior, such as periodic changes in the number of visitors, or increases in customers just before major holidays. The current paradigm of multi-armed bandit…
We address the problem of multi-group mean estimation, which seeks to allocate a finite sampling budget across multiple groups to obtain uniformly accurate estimates of their means. Unlike classical multi-armed bandits, whose objective is…
Selectivity estimation is important in query optimization, however accurate estimation is difficult when predicates are complex. Instead of existing database synopses and statistics not helpful for such cases, we introduce a new approach to…
The randomized group-greedy method and its customized method for large-scale sensor selection problems are proposed. The randomized greedy sensor selection algorithm is applied straightforwardly to the group-greedy method, and a customized…
In many machine learning applications, one needs to interactively select a sequence of items (e.g., recommending movies based on a user's feedback) or make sequential decisions in a certain order (e.g., guiding an agent through a series of…
The Exploration-Exploitation tradeoff arises in Reinforcement Learning when one cannot tell if a policy is optimal. Then, there is a constant need to explore new actions instead of exploiting past experience. In practice, it is common to…