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We investigate model-based reinforcement learning in contextual Markov decision processes (C-MDPs) in which the context is unobserved and induces confounding in the offline dataset. In such settings, conventional model-learning methods are…
This study addresses the challenges of dynamics and complexity in intelligent human-computer interaction and proposes a reinforcement learning-based optimization framework to improve long-term returns and overall experience. Human-computer…
Recent advances in recommender systems have shown that user-system interaction essentially formulates long-term optimization problems, and online reinforcement learning can be adopted to improve recommendation performance. The general…
User marketing is a key focus of consumer-based internet companies. Learning algorithms are effective to optimize marketing campaigns which increase user engagement, and facilitates cross-marketing to related products. By attracting users…
We study online learning in constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with adversarial losses and stochastic hard constraints, under bandit feedback. We consider three scenarios. In the first one, we address general CMDPs, where we…
A Markov decision process can be parameterized by a transition kernel and a reward function. Both play essential roles in the study of reinforcement learning as evidenced by their presence in the Bellman equations. In our inquiry of various…
This paper studies the problem of Anytime-Competitive Markov Decision Process (A-CMDP). Existing works on Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) aim to optimize the expected reward while constraining the expected cost over random…
Recommender systems are a ubiquitous feature of online platforms. Increasingly, they are explicitly tasked with increasing users' long-term satisfaction. In this context, we study a content exploration task, which we formalize as a…
We propose a framework for applying reinforcement learning to contextual two-stage stochastic optimization and apply this framework to the problem of energy market bidding of an off-shore wind farm. Reinforcement learning could potentially…
Learning a near optimal policy in a partially observable system remains an elusive challenge in contemporary reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider episodic reinforcement learning in a reward-mixing Markov decision process (MDP).…
The endeavor of artificial intelligence (AI) is to design autonomous agents capable of achieving complex tasks. Namely, reinforcement learning (RL) proposes a theoretical background to learn optimal behaviors. In practice, RL algorithms…
We consider the problem of bidding in online advertising, where an advertiser aims to maximize value while adhering to budget and Return-on-Spend (RoS) constraints. Unlike prior work that assumes knowledge of the value generated by winning…
We consider a constrained Markov Decision Problem (CMDP) where the goal of an agent is to maximize the expected discounted sum of rewards over an infinite horizon while ensuring that the expected discounted sum of costs exceeds a certain…
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…
Personalization enables businesses to learn customer preferences from past interactions and thus to target individual customers with more relevant content. We consider the problem of predicting the optimal promotional offer for a given…
To date, distributional reinforcement learning (distributional RL) methods have exclusively focused on the discounted setting, where an agent aims to optimize a discounted sum of rewards over time. In this work, we extend distributional RL…
Automated bidding to optimize online advertising with various constraints, e.g. ROI constraints and budget constraints, is widely adopted by advertisers. A key challenge lies in designing algorithms for non-truthful mechanisms with ROI…
We study the online learning problem of a bidder who participates in repeated auctions. With the goal of maximizing his T-period payoff, the bidder determines the optimal allocation of his budget among his bids for $K$ goods at each period.…
Reinforcement Learning algorithms that learn from human feedback (RLHF) need to be efficient in terms of statistical complexity, computational complexity, and query complexity. In this work, we consider the RLHF setting where the feedback…
The causal effect of showing an ad to a potential customer versus not, commonly referred to as "incrementality", is the fundamental question of advertising effectiveness. In digital advertising three major puzzle pieces are central to…