Related papers: Context-Action Embedding Learning for Off-Policy E…

Contextual Bandits is one of the widely popular techniques used in applications such as personalization, recommendation systems, mobile health, causal marketing etc . As a dynamic approach, it can be more efficient than standard A/B testing…

Real-world decision-making tasks are usually partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), where the state is not fully observable. Recent progress has demonstrated that recurrent reinforcement learning (RL), which consists of a…

Contextual bandits are canonical models for sequential decision-making under uncertainty in environments with time-varying components. In this setting, the expected reward of each bandit arm consists of the inner product of an unknown…

Traditional comparative learning sentence embedding directly uses the encoder to extract sentence features, and then passes in the comparative loss function for learning. However, this method pays too much attention to the sentence body and…

Unsupervised learning of vision transformers seeks to pretrain an encoder via pretext tasks without labels. Among them is the Masked Image Modeling (MIM) aligned with pretraining of language transformers by predicting masked patches as a…

Mixture proportion estimation (MPE) aims to estimate class priors from unlabeled data. This task is a critical component in weakly supervised learning, such as PU learning, learning with label noise, and domain adaptation. Existing MPE…

In applying reinforcement learning (RL) to high-stakes domains, quantitative and qualitative evaluation using observational data can help practitioners understand the generalization performance of new policies. However, this type of…

We address the consistency of a kernel ridge regression estimate of the conditional mean embedding (CME), which is an embedding of the conditional distribution of $Y$ given $X$ into a target reproducing kernel Hilbert space $\mathcal{H}_Y$.…

Autonomous cyber-physical agents and systems play an increasingly large role in our lives. To ensure that agents behave in ways aligned with the values of the societies in which they operate, we must develop techniques that allow these…

Idiomatic expressions can be problematic for natural language processing applications as their meaning cannot be inferred from their constituting words. A lack of successful methodological approaches and sufficiently large datasets prevents…

Cellular network configuration plays a critical role in network performance. In current practice, network configuration depends heavily on field experience of engineers and often remains static for a long period of time. This practice is…

We propose a robust regression approach to off-policy evaluation (OPE) for contextual bandits. We frame OPE as a covariate-shift problem and leverage modern robust regression tools. Ours is a general approach that can be used to augment any…

Large pretrained language models (LMs) have shown impressive In-Context Learning (ICL) ability, where the model learns to do an unseen task via a prompt consisting of input-output examples as the demonstration, without any parameter…

We study an online decision making problem where on each round a learner chooses a list of items based on some side information, receives a scalar feedback value for each individual item, and a reward that is linearly related to this…

Recent work shows that in-context learning and optimization of in-context examples (ICE) can significantly improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) on a wide range of tasks, leading to an apparent consensus that ICE optimization…

In the reinforcement learning literature, there are many algorithms developed for either Contextual Bandit (CB) or Markov Decision Processes (MDP) environments. However, when deploying reinforcement learning algorithms in the real world,…

Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…

Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…

The meaning conveyed by a sentence often depends on the context in which it appears. Despite the progress of sentence embedding methods, it remains unclear as how to best modify a sentence embedding conditioned on its context. To address…

Preference-based feedback is important for many applications where direct evaluation of a reward function is not feasible. A notable recent example arises in reinforcement learning from human feedback on large language models. For many of…