Related papers: Dynamic Prior Thompson Sampling for Cold-Start Exp…
Data selection is essential for any data-based optimization technique, such as Reinforcement Learning. State-of-the-art sampling strategies for the experience replay buffer improve the performance of the Reinforcement Learning agent.…
This paper develops a viable notion of learning for sampling-based algorithms that applies in broader settings than previously considered. More specifically, we model a discounted infinite-horizon MDPs with Borel state and action spaces,…
Exploration is a fundamental problem in robotics. While sampling-based planners have shown high performance, they are oftentimes compute intensive and can exhibit high variance. To this end, we propose to directly learn the underlying…
This note introduce three Bayesian style Multi-armed bandit algorithms: Information-directed sampling, Thompson Sampling and Generalized Thompson Sampling. The goal is to give an intuitive explanation for these three algorithms and their…
Chemical space is so large that brute force searches for new interesting molecules are infeasible. High-throughput virtual screening via computer cluster simulations can speed up the discovery process by collecting very large amounts of…
Modern recommendation systems ought to benefit by probing for and learning from delayed feedback. Research has tended to focus on learning from a user's response to a single recommendation. Such work, which leverages methods of supervised…
Item cold-start is a pervasive challenge for collaborative filtering (CF) recommender systems. Existing methods often train cold-start models by mapping auxiliary item content, such as images or text descriptions, into the embedding space…
We address online combinatorial optimization when the player has a prior over the adversary's sequence of losses. In this framework, Russo and Van Roy proposed an information-theoretic analysis of Thompson Sampling based on the information…
Classification models are a fundamental component of physical-asset management technologies such as structural health monitoring (SHM) systems and digital twins. Previous work introduced risk-based active learning, an online approach for…
In recent years, instructional practices in Operations Research (OR), Management Science (MS), and Analytics have increasingly shifted toward digital environments, where large and diverse groups of learners make it difficult to provide…
Mobile health (mHealth) interventions often aim to improve distal outcomes, such as clinical conditions, by optimizing proximal outcomes through just-in-time adaptive interventions. Contextual bandits provide a suitable framework for…
In linear contextual bandits, the objective is to select actions that maximize cumulative rewards, modeled as a linear function with unknown parameters. Although Thompson Sampling performs well empirically, it does not achieve optimal…
We study how a platform should design early exposure and rewards when creators strategically choose quality before release. A short testing window with a pass/fail bar induces a pass probability, the slope of which is the key sufficient…
Stochastic nonlinear dynamical systems can undergo rapid transitions relative to the change in their forcing, for example due to the occurrence of multiple equilibrium solutions for a specific interval of parameters. In this paper, we…
Models that can predict the occurrence of events ahead of time with low false-alarm rates are critical to the acceptance of decision support systems in the medical community. This challenging task is typically treated as a simple binary…
Collaborative filtering (CF) recommender systems struggle with making predictions on unseen, or 'cold', items. Systems designed to address this challenge are often trained with supervision from warm CF models in order to leverage…
Sampling a probability distribution with known likelihood is a fundamental task in computational science and engineering. Aiming at multimodality, we propose a new sampling method that takes advantage of both birth-death process and…
Sequential optimization methods are often confronted with the curse of dimensionality in high-dimensional spaces. Current approaches under the Gaussian process framework are still burdened by the computational complexity of tracking…
We study parameterized MDPs (PMDPs) in which the key parameters of interest are unknown and must be learned using Bayesian inference. One key defining feature of such models is the presence of "uninformative" actions that provide no…
Task robust adaptation is a long-standing pursuit in sequential decision-making. Some risk-averse strategies, e.g., the conditional value-at-risk principle, are incorporated in domain randomization or meta reinforcement learning to…