English
Related papers

Related papers: Leave No One Undermined: Policy Targeting with Reg…

200 papers

I examine the problem of treatment choice when a planner observes (i) covariates that describe each member of a population of interest and (ii) the outcomes of an experiment in which subjects randomly drawn from this population are randomly…

Applications · Statistics 2013-02-01 Charles F. Manski

Policy learning is a quickly growing area. As robotics and computers control day-to-day life, their error rate needs to be minimized and controlled. There are many policy learning methods and bandit methods with provable error rates that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-31 Michael Rawson , Radu Balan

State of the art online learning procedures focus either on selecting the best alternative ("best arm identification") or on minimizing the cost (the "regret"). We merge these two objectives by providing the theoretical analysis of cost…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-27 Rémy Degenne , Thomas Nedelec , Clément Calauzènes , Vianney Perchet

To unbiasedly evaluate multiple target policies, the dominant approach among RL practitioners is to run and evaluate each target policy separately. However, this evaluation method is far from efficient because samples are not shared across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Shuze Daniel Liu , Claire Chen , Shangtong Zhang

We study the subtlety of optimal paternalism when a utilitarian planner has the power to design a discrete choice set for a heterogeneous population with bounded rationality. We first consider the planning problem in abstraction. We show…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-01-23 Charles F. Manski , Eytan Sheshinski

An adversarial bandit problem with memory constraints is studied where only the statistics of a subset of arms can be stored. A hierarchical learning policy that requires only a sublinear order of memory space in terms of the number of arms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-12 Xiao Xu , Qing Zhao

In reinforcement learning, specifying reward functions that capture the intended task can be very challenging. Reward learning aims to address this issue by learning the reward function. However, a learned reward model may have a low error…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Lukas Fluri , Leon Lang , Alessandro Abate , Patrick Forré , David Krueger , Joar Skalse

We consider the problem of evaluating forecasts of binary events whose predictions are consumed by rational agents who take an action in response to a prediction, but whose utility is unknown to the forecaster. We show that optimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Robert Kleinberg , Renato Paes Leme , Jon Schneider , Yifeng Teng

We consider a simple linear control problem in which a single parameter $b$, describing the effect of the control variable, is unknown and must be learned. We work in the setting of agnostic control: we allow $b$ to be any real number and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-28 Jacob Carruth

Modeling the purposeful behavior of imperfect agents from a small number of observations is a challenging task. When restricted to the single-agent decision-theoretic setting, inverse optimal control techniques assume that observed behavior…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-08-19 Kevin Waugh , Brian D. Ziebart , J. Andrew Bagnell

It is common to encounter the situation with uncertainty for decision makers (DMs) in dealing with a complex decision making problem. The existing evidence shows that people usually fear the extreme uncertainty named as the unknown. This…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2021-08-05 Fang Liu

Bilateral trade models the task of intermediating between two strategic agents, a seller and a buyer, willing to trade a good for which they hold private valuations. We study this problem from the perspective of a broker, in a regret…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Simone Di Gregorio , Paul Dütting , Federico Fusco , Chris Schwiegelshohn

A fundamental challenge in machine learning is the choice of a loss as it characterizes our learning task, is minimized in the training phase, and serves as an evaluation criterion for estimators. Proper losses are commonly chosen, ensuring…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-04 Han Bao , Asuka Takatsu

We study online learning problems in which a decision maker has to take a sequence of decisions subject to $m$ long-term constraints. The goal of the decision maker is to maximize their total reward, while at the same time achieving small…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-16 Matteo Castiglioni , Andrea Celli , Alberto Marchesi , Giulia Romano , Nicola Gatti

We explore the question of how to learn an optimal search strategy within the example of a parking problem where parking opportunities arrive according to an unknown inhomogeneous Poisson process. The optimal policy is a threshold-type…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Stefan Ankirchner , Maximilian Philipp Thiel

In treatment allocation problems the individuals to be treated often arrive sequentially. We study a problem in which the policy maker is not only interested in the expected cumulative welfare but is also concerned about the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-24 Anders Bredahl Kock , Martin Thyrsgaard

Partial monitoring is a general model for sequential learning with limited feedback formalized as a game between two players. In this game, the learner chooses an action and at the same time the opponent chooses an outcome, then the learner…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-10-01 Junpei Komiyama , Junya Honda , Hiroshi Nakagawa

We revisit the problem of online learning with sleeping experts/bandits: in each time step, only a subset of the actions are available for the algorithm to choose from (and learn about). The work of Kleinberg et al. (2010) showed that there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Ehsan Emamjomeh-Zadeh , Chen-Yu Wei , Haipeng Luo , David Kempe

We consider estimation and control in linear time-varying dynamical systems from the perspective of regret minimization. Unlike most prior work in this area, we focus on the problem of designing causal estimators and controllers which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-24 Gautam Goel , Babak Hassibi

Online strategic classification studies settings in which agents strategically modify their features to obtain favorable predictions. For example, given a classifier that determines loan approval based on credit scores, applicants may open…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Chase Hutton , Adam Melrod , Han Shao