A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
Linear contextual bandit is an important class of sequential decision making problems with a wide range of applications to recommender systems, online advertising, healthcare, and many other machine learning related tasks. While there is a lot of prior research, tight regret bounds of linear contextual bandit with infi…
We propose a new framework for designing estimators for off-policy evaluation in contextual bandits. Our approach is based on the asymptotically optimal doubly robust estimator, but we shrink the importance weights to minimize a bound on the mean squared error, which results in a better bias-variance tradeoff in finite…
Soft Actor-Critic is a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithm for continuous action settings that is not applicable to discrete action settings. Many important settings involve discrete actions, however, and so here we derive an alternative version of the Soft Actor-Critic algorithm that is applicable to dis…
In many real-world sequential decision making problems, the number of available actions (decisions) can vary over time. While problems like catastrophic forgetting, changing transition dynamics, changing rewards functions, etc. have been well-studied in the lifelong learning literature, the setting where the action set…
The (contextual) multi-armed bandit problem (MAB) provides a formalization of sequential decision-making which has many applications. However, validly evaluating MAB policies is challenging; we either resort to simulations which inherently include debatable assumptions, or we resort to expensive field trials. Recently …
The Markov decision process (MDP) formulation used to model many real-world sequential decision making problems does not efficiently capture the setting where the set of available decisions (actions) at each time step is stochastic. Recently, the stochastic action set Markov decision process (SAS-MDP) formulation has b…
We study the linear contextual bandit problem with finite action sets. When the problem dimension is d, the time horizon is T, and there are n≤2d/2 candidate actions per time period, we (1) show that the minimax expected regret is Ω(dT(logT)(logn)) for every algorithm, and (2) introduce a V…
Efficient algorithms for online learning with changing action sets, achieving no-approximate-regret guarantees.
problem Online learning with sleeping experts/bandits, where only a subset of actions are available each time.
method Developed computationally efficient algorithms providing no-approximate-regret guarantees for the general problem and better approximation ratios for special cases.
result Achieved no-approximate-regret guarantees for the general sleeping expert/bandit problems and better approximation ratios for specific cases.
We address the online linear optimization problem with bandit feedback. Our contribution is twofold. First, we provide an algorithm (based on exponential weights) with a regret of order dnlogN for any finite action set with N actions, under the assumption that the instantaneous loss is bounded by 1. This…
Motivated by the recent applications of game-theoretical learning techniques to the design of distributed control systems, we study a class of control problems that can be formulated as potential games with continuous action sets, and we propose an actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithm that provably converges t…
We introduce efficient algorithms which achieve nearly optimal regrets for the problem of stochastic online shortest path routing with end-to-end feedback. The setting is a natural application of the combinatorial stochastic bandits problem, a special case of the linear stochastic bandits problem. We show how the diffi…
The paper tackles Nash-regret minimization in congestion games with bandit feedback.
problem Minimizing Nash-regret in congestion games with bandit feedback.
method Proposes centralized and decentralized algorithms for congestion games with bandit feedback, and a centralized algorithm for Markov congestion games.
result Sample complexity depends polynomially on the number of players and facilities, not the size of the action set.
The use of Reinforcement Learning in real-world scenarios is strongly limited by issues of scale. Most RL learning algorithms are unable to deal with problems composed of hundreds or sometimes even dozens of possible actions, and therefore cannot be applied to many real-world problems. We consider the RL problem in the…
The bundle approach and n-contextuality reveal quantum model contextuality.
problem Understanding contextuality in quantum models using topology.
method Using the bundle approach, we describe contextuality as the non-existence of global sections in the measure bundle. We introduce n-contextuality to explore model dependence on scenario topology.
result Quantum theory and GHZ models exhibit all levels of n-contextuality, showing contextuality is related to holonomy group non-triviality.
Transformers model contextual relations using probabilistic measures, revealing their expressive power.
problem Lack of clear understanding of Transformer's ability to model contextual relations.
method Introduced a measure-theoretic framework connecting softmax attention and entropy-regularized optimal transport.
result Transformer architectures can approximate arbitrary contextual relations, and the choice of normalization affects how these relations are represented.