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arXiv research

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.

168,694 papers · 148 categories

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58115173230 · Jun 202019922001200920172026
48 results for Epsilon-Greedy Exploration

Bayesian approach improves ε\varepsilon-greedy exploration in RL.

problem Improving ε\varepsilon-greedy exploration in model-free RL.
method Introducing a Bayesian model update for ε\varepsilon based on BMC.
result Proposed ε\varepsilon- exttt{BMC} algorithm efficiently balances exploration and exploitation.

Contextual multi-armed bandit problems arise frequently in important industrial applications. Existing solutions model the context either linearly, which enables uncertainty driven (principled) exploration, or non-linearly, by using epsilon-greedy exploration policies. Here we present a deep learning framework for cont…

2018-07-25abs ↗pdf ↗

The paper explores MAB strategies for very short horizons, introducing new methods and showing improved performance.

problem Short horizon multi-armed bandit problems in games.
method Regression oracles, forced exploration, UCBT strategy.
result Combination of epsilon-greedy or epsilon-decreasing with regression oracles outperforms other strategies.

A major challenge in reinforcement learning is exploration, when local dithering methods such as epsilon-greedy sampling are insufficient to solve a given task. Many recent methods have proposed to intrinsically motivate an agent to seek novel states, driving the agent to discover improved reward. However, while state-…

2019-06-19abs ↗pdf ↗

Efficient exploration in complex environments remains a major challenge for reinforcement learning. We propose bootstrapped DQN, a simple algorithm that explores in a computationally and statistically efficient manner through use of randomized value functions. Unlike dithering strategies such as epsilon-greedy explorat…

2016-02-15abs ↗pdf ↗

We propose randomized least-squares value iteration (RLSVI) -- a new reinforcement learning algorithm designed to explore and generalize efficiently via linearly parameterized value functions. We explain why versions of least-squares value iteration that use Boltzmann or epsilon-greedy exploration can be highly ineffic…

2014-02-04abs ↗pdf ↗

Exploration is a difficult challenge in reinforcement learning and even recent state-of-the art curiosity-based methods rely on the simple epsilon-greedy strategy to generate novelty. We argue that pure random walks do not succeed to properly expand the exploration area in most environments and propose to replace singl…

2018-07-05abs ↗pdf ↗

Scalable and effective exploration remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). While there are methods with optimality guarantees in the setting of discrete state and action spaces, these methods cannot be applied in high-dimensional deep RL scenarios. As such, most contemporary RL relies on simple heuristi…

2016-05-31abs ↗pdf ↗

Exploration is a difficult challenge in reinforcement learning and is of prime importance in sparse reward environments. However, many of the state of the art deep reinforcement learning algorithms, that rely on epsilon-greedy, fail on these environments. In such cases, empowerment can serve as an intrinsic reward sign…

2018-10-11abs ↗pdf ↗

Regularization-induced exploration improves contextual bandit performance.

problem Complex reward models in real-world contextual bandits are hard to explore effectively.
method Regularization-induced exploration using stochasticity in cross-validation.
result Regularization-induced exploration leads to reliable exploration in large-scale business environments.

In this work we present a novel approach for transfer-guided exploration in reinforcement learning that is inspired by the human tendency to leverage experiences from similar encounters in the past while navigating a new task. Given an optimal policy in a related task-environment, we show that its bisimulation distance…

2019-06-27abs ↗pdf ↗

Proposes EE-Net for neural exploration in contextual bandits.

problem Exploitation-Exploration tradeoff in contextual bandits.
method Uses two neural networks: Exploitation and Exploration, to learn reward function and adaptively explore.
result Achieves O(TlogT)\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T\log T}) regret and outperforms existing methods.

This research tackles balancing exploration and exploitation in deep RL for partially observable systems.

problem Balancing exploration and exploitation in deep RL for partially observable systems.
method Deployed and tested several techniques including adaptive and deterministic exploration strategies, and a modified quadratic loss function.
result Adaptive methods better approximate the trade-off between exploration and exploitation.

A simple uncertainty measure improves deep bandit performance.

problem Efficient exploration in complex environments with deep neural networks.
method Sample Average Uncertainty (SAU) for estimating outcome uncertainty directly.
result SAU matches the uncertainty of Thompson Sampling and its regret bounds.

Cramming method evaluates learned policies from contextual bandits efficiently.

problem Evaluating final learned policies from contextual bandit algorithms.
method On-policy evaluation using a single pass of data, ensuring consistency and asymptotic normality.
result Cramming method reduces evaluation standard error by approximately 40% compared to off-policy methods.

We consider the problem of selecting a seed set to maximize the expected number of influenced nodes in the social network, referred to as the \textit{influence maximization} (IM) problem. We assume that the topology of the social network is prescribed while the influence probabilities among edges are unknown. In order …

2019-11-25abs ↗pdf ↗

Contextual bandits are online learners that, given an input, select an arm and receive a reward for that arm. They use the reward as a learning signal and aim to maximize the total reward over the inputs. Contextual bandits are commonly used to solve recommendation or ranking problems. This paper considers a learning s…

2019-10-11abs ↗pdf ↗

Study Whittle index learning algorithms for restless bandits with constant stepsizes.

problem Optimizing decisions in restless multi-armed bandits with constant stepsizes.
method Developed Q-learning algorithms with constant stepsizes for index learning in restless bandits, extending to DQN and function approximations.
result The algorithms learn the Whittle index effectively.

An automatic program that generates constant profit from the financial market is lucrative for every market practitioner. Recent advance in deep reinforcement learning provides a framework toward end-to-end training of such trading agent. In this paper, we propose an Markov Decision Process (MDP) model suitable for the…

2018-07-08abs ↗pdf ↗

Develops a combinatorial semi-bandit method for electric vehicle charging station selection.

problem Long-distance navigation for BEVs with unknown charging station availability and performance.
method Combinatorial semi-bandit framework, pre-processing road network, Bayesian modeling, Thompson Sampling, BayesUCB, Epsilon-greedy.
result Demonstrates improved navigation performance on long-distance BEV charging station selection.

This work introduces reward teaching for federated multi-armed bandits to guide clients towards global optimality.

problem Existing federated multi-armed bandits designs assume clients will follow the server's protocol, but this is not always feasible.
method Introduces reward teaching where the server adjusts clients' local rewards to encourage global optimality, using phased Teaching-After-Learning (TAL) and Teaching-While-Learning (TWL) algorithms.
result Demonstrates that TAL achieves logarithmic regrets with only logarithmic adjustment costs, and TWL outperforms TAL for UCB1 clients.

The paper studies how to allocate human validation in AI-assisted tasks to minimize errors.

problem Heterogeneous reliability of AI-generated signals across tasks, products, and customer segments.
method Tuned prediction-powered inference, upper confidence bounds policy, Neyman square-root rule.
result The proposed policy outperforms uniform and epsilon-greedy allocation, closing most of the gap to the oracle when reliability is heterogeneous.

This paper optimizes attacks on stochastic bandits and proposes defenses against them.

problem Optimizing adversarial attacks on stochastic bandit algorithms.
method Designs optimal attack strategies and proposes defense algorithms.
result Optimal attack strategies and defense algorithms achieve near perfect performance.

A new multi-objective RL framework improves intrinsic exploration performance.

problem Sub-optimal exploration performance due to ad-hoc handling of intrinsic exploration.
method A multi-objective RL framework where both exploration and exploitation are optimized as separate objectives.
result EMU-Q method outperforms classic and other intrinsic RL methods on benchmarks.

Effective and intelligent exploration has been an unresolved problem for reinforcement learning. Most contemporary reinforcement learning relies on simple heuristic strategies such as εε-greedy exploration or adding Gaussian noise to actions. These heuristics, however, are unable to intelligently distinguish the well …

2019-06-17abs ↗pdf ↗

New findings on when to use action space exploration in reinforcement learning.

problem Understanding when to use action space exploration over traditional methods.
method Theoretical analysis and empirical testing of simple exploration methods.
result Exploration in action space is preferred when parametric complexity exceeds action space dimensionality and horizon length.

New exploration bonuses improve reinforcement learning efficiency.

problem Efficient exploration in unknown environments with limited feedback.
method Improved exploration bonuses scaling with 1/n and improved stopping time analysis.
result Faster learning rates and improved sample complexity in pure-exploration settings.

Proposes a method to avoid excessive exploration in reinforcement learning.

problem Avoiding excessive exploration in reinforcement learning to deploy it in practice.
method Designs a novel algorithm using UCB reinforcement learning policy with adaptive exploration constraints.
result Proves that the approach remains conservative while minimizing regret in tabular settings and validates on real-world tasks.

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). State-of-the-art RL algorithms suffer from high sample complexity, particularly in the sparse reward case, where they can do no better than to explore in all directions until the first positive rewards are found. To mitigate …

2020-01-20abs ↗pdf ↗

A grand challenge in reinforcement learning is intelligent exploration, especially when rewards are sparse or deceptive. Two Atari games serve as benchmarks for such hard-exploration domains: Montezuma's Revenge and Pitfall. On both games, current RL algorithms perform poorly, even those with intrinsic motivation, whic…

2019-01-30abs ↗pdf ↗

New algorithm reduces regret by allowing free exploration in multi-armed bandits.

problem Designing an adaptive policy to minimize regret with a free exploration budget.
method Introduced (α,β)(α,β)-probably saving policies and a two-phase algorithm UFE-KLUCB-H.
result UFE-KLUCB-H accumulates strictly less regret than non-free exploration policies.

The paper tackles pure exploration in multi-armed bandits with low rank structure using oblivious sampling.

problem Pure exploration in multi-armed bandits with low rank reward sequences.
method The approach involves separating the exploration strategy from feedback, using oblivious sampling, and incorporating kernel information of reward vectors.
result Efficient algorithms with regret bound O(d(lnN)/n)O(d\sqrt{(\ln N)/n}) for both time-varying and fixed cases, with a lower bound gap of O(lnN)O(\sqrt{\ln N}).

The Exploration-Exploitation tradeoff arises in Reinforcement Learning when one cannot tell if a policy is optimal. Then, there is a constant need to explore new actions instead of exploiting past experience. In practice, it is common to resolve the tradeoff by using a fixed exploration mechanism, such as εε-greedy ex…

2018-12-13abs ↗pdf ↗

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 meet. We provide a systematic study of the community exploration problem, from off…

2018-11-13abs ↗pdf ↗

MADE improves exploration in RL by maximizing deviation from explored regions.

problem Efficient exploration in high-dimensional RL tasks with sparse rewards.
method Proposes a new exploration approach via maximizing the deviation of the occupancy of the next policy from explored regions, adding it as an adaptive regularizer to the RL objective.
result Significantly improves sample efficiency in navigation and locomotion tasks.

Maximizes Rényi entropy for efficient exploration in reward-free RL.

problem Challenges of exploration in reward-free reinforcement learning.
method Maximizes Rényi entropy over state-action space in exploration phase; uses batch RL for planning phase.
result Effective and sample-efficient exploration leading to superior policies.