Related papers: Delightful Exploration
We study the problem of minimising regret in two-armed bandit problems with Gaussian rewards. Our objective is to use this simple setting to illustrate that strategies based on an exploration phase (up to a stopping time) followed by…
Individual decision-makers consume information revealed by the previous decision makers, and produce information that may help in future decisions. This phenomenon is common in a wide range of scenarios in the Internet economy, as well as…
We empirically study the interplay between exploration and competition. Systems that learn from interactions with users often engage in exploration: making potentially suboptimal decisions in order to acquire new information for future…
Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…
We introduce the community exploration problem that has many real-world applications such as online advertising. In the problem, an explorer allocates limited budget to explore communities so as to maximize the number of members he could…
We study online assortment optimization under stochastic choice when a decision maker simultaneously values cumulative revenue performance and the quality of post-hoc inference on revenue contrasts. We analyze a forced-exploration…
We consider interactive learning and covering problems, in a setting where actions may incur different costs, depending on the response to the action. We propose a natural greedy algorithm for response-dependent costs. We bound the…
We investigate hide-and-seek games on complex networks using a random walk framework. Specifically, we investigate the efficiency of various degree-biased random walk search strategies to locate items that are randomly hidden on a subset of…
Consider a channel with a given input alphabet size and a given input distribution. Our aim is to degrade or upgrade it to a channel with at most L output letters. The paper contains four main results. The first result, from which the paper…
Motivated by the use of high speed circuit switches in large scale data centers, we consider the problem of circuit switch scheduling. In this problem we are given demands between pairs of servers and the goal is to schedule at every time…
We develop several new algorithms for learning Markov Decision Processes in an infinite-horizon average-reward setting with linear function approximation. Using the optimism principle and assuming that the MDP has a linear structure, we…
Efficient selection among multiple generative models is increasingly important in modern generative AI, where sampling from suboptimal models is costly. This problem can be formulated as a multi-armed bandit task. Under diversity-aware…
In this paper, we investigate a problem of actively learning threshold in latent space, where the unknown reward $g(\gamma, v)$ depends on the proposed threshold $\gamma$ and latent value $v$ and it can be $only$ achieved if the threshold…
A key challenge to deploying reinforcement learning in practice is avoiding excessive (harmful) exploration in individual episodes. We propose a natural constraint on exploration -- \textit{uniformly} outperforming a conservative policy…
Learning good interventions in a causal graph can be modelled as a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with side-information. First, we study this problem when interventions are more expensive than observations and a budget is specified.…
We develop a model selection approach to tackle reinforcement learning with adversarial corruption in both transition and reward. For finite-horizon tabular MDPs, without prior knowledge on the total amount of corruption, our algorithm…
Bayesian optimization is a framework for global search via maximum a posteriori updates rather than simulated annealing, and has gained prominence for decision-making under uncertainty. In this work, we cast Bayesian optimization as a…
Exploration is often necessary in online learning to maximize long-term reward, but it comes at the cost of short-term 'regret'. We study how this cost of exploration is shared across multiple groups. For example, in a clinical trial…
In this paper we consider multi-objective reinforcement learning where the objectives are balanced using preferences. In practice, the preferences are often given in an adversarial manner, e.g., customers can be picky in many applications.…
Despite the considerable attention given to the questions of \textit{how much} and \textit{how to} explore in deep reinforcement learning, the investigation into \textit{when} to explore remains relatively less researched. While more…