Related papers: In-Context Learning for Pure Exploration in Contin…

Sequential learning methods, such as active learning and Bayesian optimization, aim to select the most informative data for task learning. In many applications, however, data selection is constrained by unknown safety conditions, motivating…

Realistic environments often provide agents with very limited feedback. When the environment is initially unknown, the feedback, in the beginning, can be completely absent, and the agents may first choose to devote all their effort on…

While experimental design often focuses on selecting the single best alternative from a finite set (e.g., in ranking and selection or best-arm identification), many pure-exploration problems pursue richer goals. Given a specific goal,…

Contextual bandit problems are a natural fit for many information retrieval tasks, such as learning to rank, text classification, recommendation, etc. However, existing learning methods for contextual bandit problems have one of two…

Effective exploration is critical for reinforcement learning agents in environments with sparse rewards or high-dimensional state-action spaces. Recent works based on state-visitation counts, curiosity and entropy-maximization generate…

Active visual exploration aims to assist an agent with a limited field of view to understand its environment based on partial observations made by choosing the best viewing directions in the scene. Recent methods have tried to address this…

Exploration in unknown environments is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning and control. In this work, we study task-guided exploration and determine what precisely an agent must learn about their environment in order to complete…

Randomized A/B comparisons of alternative pedagogical strategies or other course improvements could provide useful empirical evidence for instructor decision-making. However, traditional experiments do not provide a straightforward pathway…

A key feature of sequential decision making under uncertainty is a need to balance between exploiting--choosing the best action according to the current knowledge, and exploring--obtaining information about values of other actions. The…

Efficient exploration remains a major challenge for reinforcement learning. One reason is that the variability of the returns often depends on the current state and action, and is therefore heteroscedastic. Classical exploration strategies…

We consider interactive learning in the realizable setting and develop a general framework to handle problems ranging from best arm identification to active classification. We begin our investigation with the observation that agnostic…

Contextual bandit learning is an increasingly popular approach to optimizing recommender systems via user feedback, but can be slow to converge in practice due to the need for exploring a large feature space. In this paper, we propose a…

We propose online algorithms for sequential learning in the contextual multi-armed bandit setting. Our approach is to partition the context space and then optimally combine all of the possible mappings between the partition regions and the…

Contextual bandits are widely-used in the study of learning-based control policies for finite action spaces. While the problem is well-studied for bandits with perfectly observed context vectors, little is known about the case of…

This paper aims to put forward the concept that learning to take safe actions in unknown environments, even with probability one guarantees, can be achieved without the need for an unbounded number of exploratory trials, provided that one…

The in-context learning paradigm with LLMs has been instrumental in advancing a wide range of natural language processing tasks. The selection of few-shot examples (exemplars / demonstration samples) is essential for constructing effective…

We address policy learning with logged data in contextual bandits. Current offline-policy learning algorithms are mostly based on inverse propensity score (IPS) weighting requiring the logging policy to have \emph{full support} i.e. a…

A fundamental difficulty of causal learning is that causal models can generally not be fully identified based on observational data only. Interventional data, that is, data originating from different experimental environments, improves…

Contextual bandits can solve a huge range of real-world problems. However, current popular algorithms to solve them either rely on linear models, or unreliable uncertainty estimation in non-linear models, which are required to deal with the…

We consider the development of adaptive, instance-dependent algorithms for interactive decision making (bandits, reinforcement learning, and beyond) that, rather than only performing well in the worst case, adapt to favorable properties of…