Related papers: Optimization of Epsilon-Greedy Exploration
We study reward-free and reward-agnostic exploration in episodic finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs), where an agent explores an unknown environment without observing external rewards. Reward-free exploration aims to enable…
We propose a practical Bayesian optimization method using Gaussian process regression, of which the marginal likelihood is maximized where the number of model selection steps is guided by a pre-defined threshold. Since Bayesian optimization…
Coordinate descent with random coordinate selection is the current state of the art for many large scale optimization problems. However, greedy selection of the steepest coordinate on smooth problems can yield convergence rates independent…
We introduce Parameterized Exploration (PE), a simple family of methods for model-based tuning of the exploration schedule in sequential decision problems. Unlike common heuristics for exploration, our method accounts for the time horizon…
We introduce in this paper an algorithm named Contextuel-E-Greedy that tackles the dynamicity of the user's content. It is based on dynamic exploration/exploitation tradeoff and can adaptively balance the two aspects by deciding which…
We study a multi-objective model on the allocation of reusable resources under model uncertainty. Heterogeneous customers arrive sequentially according to a latent stochastic process, request for certain amounts of resources, and occupy…
In order to compute near-optimal policies with policy-gradient algorithms, it is common in practice to include intrinsic exploration terms in the learning objective. Although the effectiveness of these terms is usually justified by an…
Myopic exploration policies such as epsilon-greedy, softmax, or Gaussian noise fail to explore efficiently in some reinforcement learning tasks and yet, they perform well in many others. In fact, in practice, they are often selected as the…
Boltzmann exploration is a classic strategy for sequential decision-making under uncertainty, and is one of the most standard tools in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Despite its widespread use, there is virtually no theoretical understanding…
Biases in existing datasets used to train algorithmic decision rules can raise ethical and economic concerns due to the resulting disparate treatment of different groups. We propose an algorithm for sequentially debiasing such datasets…
Sequence models are a critical component of modern NLP systems, but their predictions are difficult to explain. We consider model explanations though rationales, subsets of context that can explain individual model predictions. We find…
In this paper, we consider the problem of adjusting the exploration rate when using value-of-information-based exploration. We do this by converting the value-of-information optimization into a problem of finding equilibria of a flow for a…
We propose a new stochastic optimization framework for empirical risk minimization problems such as those that arise in machine learning. The traditional approaches, such as (mini-batch) stochastic gradient descent (SGD), utilize an…
This paper introduces a novel stochastic control framework to enhance the capabilities of automated investment managers, or robo-advisors, by accurately inferring clients' investment preferences from past activities. Our approach leverages…
Reward-free exploration is a reinforcement learning setting studied by Jin et al. (2020), who address it by running several algorithms with regret guarantees in parallel. In our work, we instead give a more natural adaptive approach for…
In the context of Gaussian conditioning, greedy algorithms iteratively select the most informative measurements, given an observed Gaussian random variable. However, the convergence analysis for conditioning Gaussian random variables…
Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or…
Maximum Inner Product Search (MIPS) is an important task in many machine learning applications such as the prediction phase of a low-rank matrix factorization model for a recommender system. There have been some works on how to perform MIPS…
Many robotic systems deal with uncertainty by performing a sequence of information gathering actions. In this work, we focus on the problem of efficiently constructing such a sequence by drawing an explicit connection to submodularity.…
Balancing exploration and exploitation is a fundamental part of reinforcement learning, yet most state-of-the-art algorithms use a naive exploration protocol like $\epsilon$-greedy. This contributes to the problem of high sample complexity,…