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It is challenging for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to succeed in real-world applications like financial trading and logistic system due to the noisy observation and environment shifting between training and evaluation. Thus, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Zhengyu Yang , Kan Ren , Xufang Luo , Minghuan Liu , Weiqing Liu , Jiang Bian , Weinan Zhang , Dongsheng Li

We consider the problem of learning from revealed preferences in an online setting. In our framework, each period a consumer buys an optimal bundle of goods from a merchant according to her (linear) utility function and current prices,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2014-12-02 Kareem Amin , Rachel Cummings , Lili Dworkin , Michael Kearns , Aaron Roth

The expectation--maximization (EM) algorithm combines global monotonicity, local linear convergence, and strong practical robustness, but these features are usually analyzed separately. Global descent is nonlinear, whereas local convergence…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-11 Qiao Wang

We propose an active learning algorithm for linear system identification with optimal centered noise excitation. Notably, our algorithm, based on ordinary least squares and semidefinite programming, attains the minimal sample complexity…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-08 Kaito Ito , Alexandre Proutiere

In this paper we discuss practical limitations of the standard choice-based demand models used in the literature to estimate demand from sales transaction data. We present modifications and extensions of the models and discuss data…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-08-25 Norbert Remenyi , Xiaodong Luo

This paper proposes a statistically optimal approach for learning a function value using a confidence interval in a wide range of models, including general non-parametric estimation of an expected loss described as a stochastic programming…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-07 Arnab Ganguly , Tobias Sutter

Machine learning models have exhibited exceptional results in various domains. The most prevalent approach for learning is the empirical risk minimizer (ERM), which adapts the model's weights to reduce the loss on a training set and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Koby Bibas

One of the challenges in online reinforcement learning (RL) is that the agent needs to trade off the exploration of the environment and the exploitation of the samples to optimize its behavior. Whether we optimize for regret, sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-19 Jean Tarbouriech , Matteo Pirotta , Michal Valko , Alessandro Lazaric

We show that $n$-variable tree-structured Ising models can be learned computationally-efficiently to within total variation distance $\epsilon$ from an optimal $O(n \ln n/\epsilon^2)$ samples, where $O(\cdot)$ hides an absolute constant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-01 Constantinos Daskalakis , Qinxuan Pan

Contract design involves a principal who establishes contractual agreements about payments for outcomes that arise from the actions of an agent. In this paper, we initiate the study of deep learning for the automated design of optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Tonghan Wang , Paul Dütting , Dmitry Ivanov , Inbal Talgam-Cohen , David C. Parkes

We study the problem of exploration in Reinforcement Learning and present a novel model-free solution. We adopt an information-theoretical viewpoint and start from the instance-specific lower bound of the number of samples that have to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

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

The common way to optimize auction and pricing systems is to set aside a small fraction of the traffic to run experiments. This leads to the question: how can we learn the most with the smallest amount of data? For truthful auctions, this…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-11-09 Renato Paes Leme , Balasubramanian Sivan , Yifeng Teng , Pratik Worah

The Bayesian persuasion paradigm of strategic communication models interaction between a privately-informed agent, called the sender, and an ignorant but rational agent, called the receiver. The goal is typically to design a (near-)optimal…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-06-21 Ronen Gradwohl , Niklas Hahn , Martin Hoefer , Rann Smorodinsky

We present a framework for the efficient computation of optimal Bayesian decisions under intractable likelihoods, by learning a surrogate model for the expected utility (or its distribution) as a function of the action and data spaces. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-13 Justin Alsing , Thomas D. P. Edwards , Benjamin Wandelt

In the design and analysis of revenue-maximizing auctions, auction performance is typically measured with respect to a prior distribution over inputs. The most obvious source for such a distribution is past data. The goal is to understand…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-11-30 Richard Cole , Tim Roughgarden

We consider the classic problem of $(\epsilon,\delta)$-PAC learning a best arm where the goal is to identify with confidence $1-\delta$ an arm whose mean is an $\epsilon$-approximation to that of the highest mean arm in a multi-armed bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Avinatan Hassidim , Ron Kupfer , Yaron Singer

In this paper, we consider a multi-attribute decision making problem where the decision maker's (DM's) objective is to maximize the expected utility of outcomes but the true utility function which captures the DM's risk preference is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-30 Qiong Wu , Sainan Zhang , Wei Wang , Huifu Xu

In this paper, we consider the revealed preferences problem from a learning perspective. Every day, a price vector and a budget is drawn from an unknown distribution, and a rational agent buys his most preferred bundle according to some…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-11-20 Morteza Zadimoghaddam , Aaron Roth

This work studies the general principles of improving the learning of language models (LMs), which aims at reducing the necessary training steps for achieving superior performance. Specifically, we present a theory for the optimal learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Yuxian Gu , Li Dong , Yaru Hao , Qingxiu Dong , Minlie Huang , Furu Wei