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The field of Reinforcement Learning (RL) has garnered increasing attention for its ability of optimizing user retention in recommender systems. A primary obstacle in this optimization process is the environment non-stationarity stemming…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Zhenghai Xue , Qingpeng Cai , Bin Yang , Lantao Hu , Peng Jiang , Kun Gai , Bo An

A robot's deployment environment often involves perceptual changes that differ from what it has experienced during training. Standard practices such as data augmentation attempt to bridge this gap by augmenting source images in an effort to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-18 Takuma Yoneda , Ge Yang , Matthew R. Walter , Bradly Stadie

This paper studies the optimal mechanism to motivate effort in a dynamic principal-agent model without transfers. An agent is engaged in a task with uncertain future rewards and can quit at any time. The principal knows the reward and…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-16 Chang Liu

Stable matching is a fundamental area with many practical applications, such as centralised clearinghouses for school choice or job markets. Recent work has introduced the paradigm of near-feasibility in capacitated matching settings, where…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Frederik Glitzner

Quantum annealing has garnered significant attention as meta-heuristics inspired by quantum physics for combinatorial optimization problems. Among its many applications, nonnegative/binary matrix factorization stands out for its complexity…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-01-07 Renichiro Haba , Masayuki Ohzeki , Kazuyuki Tanaka

We study a principal-agent team production model. The principal hires a team of agents to participate in a common production task. The exact effort of each agent is unobservable and unverifiable, but the total production outcome (e.g. the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Shiliang Zuo

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) methods assume that the expert data is generated by an agent optimizing some reward function. However, in many settings, the agent may optimize a reward function subject to some constraints, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-01 Ashish Gaurav , Kasra Rezaee , Guiliang Liu , Pascal Poupart

Direct Alignment Algorithms (DAAs) such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have emerged as alternatives to the standard Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Phuc Minh Nguyen , Ngoc-Hieu Nguyen , Duy H. M. Nguyen , Anji Liu , An Mai , Binh T. Nguyen , Daniel Sonntag , Khoa D. Doan

We study a natural combinatorial single-principal multi-agent contract design problem, in which a principal motivates a team of agents to exert effort toward a given task. At the heart of our model is a reward function, which maps the agent…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Paul Duetting , Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Thomas Kesselheim

Causal estimands can vary significantly depending on the relationship between outcomes in treatment and control groups, potentially leading to wide partial identification (PI) intervals that impede decision making. Incorporating covariates…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-02 Sirui Lin , Zijun Gao , Jose Blanchet , Peter Glynn

We study optimal contract design for large populations of heterogeneous agents whose actions generate network spillovers represented by an interaction function. In a linear-quadratic framework, we solve the finite-agent problem and its…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-19 Guillermo Alonso Alvarez , Erhan Bayraktar , Ibrahim Ekren

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for many control applications but faces challenges such as limited data coverage and value function overestimation. In this paper, we propose an implicit actor-critic (iAC)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-29 Vanshaj Khattar , Ming Jin

The idea of iterative process optimization based on collected output measurements, or "real-time optimization" (RTO), has gained much prominence in recent decades, with many RTO algorithms being proposed, researched, and developed. While…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2013-08-14 Gene A. Bunin , Grégory François , Dominique Bonvin

Experience replay enables reinforcement learning agents to memorize and reuse past experiences, just as humans replay memories for the situation at hand. Contemporary off-policy algorithms either replay past experiences uniformly or utilize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-21 Daochen Zha , Kwei-Herng Lai , Kaixiong Zhou , Xia Hu

Existing value-based online reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms suffer from slow policy exploitation due to ineffective exploration and delayed policy updates. To address these challenges, we propose an algorithm called Instant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Gong Gao , Weidong Zhao , Xianhui Liu , Ning Jia

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a central paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. Group-based policy optimization methods, such as GRPO, typically allocate a fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Tao Wang , Shuo Li , Yan Sun , Dongsheng Ding , Edgar Dobriban

A principal uses payments conditioned on stochastic outcomes of a team project to elicit costly effort from the team members. We develop a multi-agent generalization of a classic first-order approach to contract optimization by leveraging…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-03-13 Krishna Dasaratha , Benjamin Golub , Anant Shah

For a general entropy-regularized stochastic control problem on an infinite horizon, we prove that a policy iteration algorithm (PIA) converges to an optimal relaxed control. Contrary to the standard stochastic control literature, classical…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-14 Yu-Jui Huang , Zhenhua Wang , Zhou Zhou

In dynamic mechanism design literature, one critical aspect has been typically ignored-the agents' periodic participation, which they can adapt and plan strategically. We propose a framework for dynamic principal-multiagent problems,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Tao Zhang , Quanyan Zhu

Recent works have applied the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to the multi-agent cooperative tasks, such as Independent PPO (IPPO); and vanilla Multi-agent PPO (MAPPO) which has a centralized value function. However, previous literature…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Jian Hu , Siyue Hu , Shih-wei Liao