Related papers: Delightful Exploration
$\varepsilon$-greedy is a policy used to balance exploration and exploitation in many reinforcement learning setting. In cases where the agent uses some on-policy algorithm to learn optimal behaviour, it makes sense for the agent to explore…
Recent work on exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) has led to a series of increasingly complex solutions to the problem. This increase in complexity often comes at the expense of generality. Recent empirical studies suggest that,…
Online learning algorithms, widely used to power search and content optimization on the web, must balance exploration and exploitation, potentially sacrificing the experience of current users in order to gain information that will lead to…
The Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE) paradigm is widely used in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning. However, conventional methods based on CTDE can suffer from value underestimation and converge to…
The contextual bandit literature has traditionally focused on algorithms that address the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. In particular, greedy algorithms that exploit current estimates without any exploration may be sub-optimal in…
We study the repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal indirectly interacts with the unknown environment by proposing incentives for the agent to play arms. Most existing work assumes the agent has full knowledge of the…
Sequential learning problems are common in several fields of research and practical applications. Examples include dynamic pricing and assortment, design of auctions and incentives and permeate a large number of sequential treatment…
The performance of acquisition functions for Bayesian optimisation to locate the global optimum of continuous functions is investigated in terms of the Pareto front between exploration and exploitation. We show that Expected Improvement…
The Greedy algorithm is the simplest heuristic in sequential decision problem that carelessly takes the locally optimal choice at each round, disregarding any advantages of exploring and/or information gathering. Theoretically, it is known…
Agents' learning from feedback shapes economic outcomes, and many economic decision-makers today employ learning algorithms to make consequential choices. This note shows that a widely used learning algorithm, $\varepsilon$-Greedy, exhibits…
Modern recommendation systems rely on exploration to learn user preferences for new items, typically implementing uniform exploration policies (e.g., epsilon-greedy) due to their simplicity and compatibility with machine learning (ML)…
Greedy BST (or simply Greedy) is an online self-adjusting binary search tree defined in the geometric view ([Lucas, 1988; Munro, 2000; Demaine, Harmon, Iacono, Kane, Patrascu, SODA 2009). Along with Splay trees (Sleator, Tarjan 1985),…
We study the greedy (exploitation-only) algorithm in bandit problems with a known reward structure. We allow arbitrary finite reward structures, while prior work focused on a few specific ones. We fully characterize when the greedy…
Combining model-based and model-free reinforcement learning approaches, this paper proposes and analyzes an $\epsilon$-policy gradient algorithm for the online pricing learning task. The algorithm extends $\epsilon$-greedy algorithm by…
Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…
In retail, there are predictable yet dramatic time-dependent patterns in customer behavior, such as periodic changes in the number of visitors, or increases in customers just before major holidays. The current paradigm of multi-armed bandit…
Bandit learning is characterized by the tension between long-term exploration and short-term exploitation. However, as has recently been noted, in settings in which the choices of the learning algorithm correspond to important decisions…
While learning in an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent should trade off exploration to discover new information about the MDP, and exploitation of the current knowledge to maximize the reward. Although the agent will…
Online learning algorithms, widely used to power search and content optimization on the web, must balance exploration and exploitation, potentially sacrificing the experience of current users for information that will lead to better…
Exploration is a crucial and distinctive aspect of reinforcement learning (RL) that remains a fundamental open problem. Several methods have been proposed to tackle this challenge. Commonly used methods inject random noise directly into the…