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.
We model human decision-making behaviors in a risk-taking task using inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) for the purposes of understanding real human decision making under risk. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work applying IRL to reveal the implicit reward function in human risk-taking decision making…
New method uses explicit human demonstrations to teach missing features in reward learning.
problem Reward learning methods rely on handcrafted features, limiting their ability to adapt to new or unexplained corrections.
method Introduces human input guiding the robot from states with missing features to states without, teaching the feature explicitly and integrating it into the reward function.
result Decreases sample complexity and improves generalization of the learned reward over deep IRL baseline.
The paper develops a reinforcement learning model to estimate ad impact considering delayed and cumulative effects.
problem Accurately estimating ad impact considering delayed and long-term effects, cumulative impacts, and customer heterogeneity.
method Modeling ad bidding as a Contextual Markov Decision Process (CMDP) with delayed Poisson rewards, proposing a two-stage maximum likelihood estimator and reinforcement learning algorithm.
result Achieves a near-optimal regret bound of O~(dH2T), validating the approach through simulation experiments.
Bayesian REX learns Atari games from demonstrations efficiently.
problem Bayesian reward learning for complex control problems is computationally intractable.
method Bayesian Reward Extrapolation (Bayesian REX) pre-trains a low-dimensional feature encoding and uses preferences to perform fast Bayesian inference.
result Bayesian REX learns Atari games from demonstrations in 5 minutes, competitive with state-of-the-art methods.
This paper proposes a novel approach for constructing effective personalized policies when the observed data lacks counter-factual information, is biased and possesses many features. The approach is applicable in a wide variety of settings from healthcare to advertising to education to finance. These settings have in c…
We introduce a new class of reinforcement learning methods referred to as {\em episodic multi-armed bandits} (eMAB). In eMAB the learner proceeds in {\em episodes}, each composed of several {\em steps}, in which it chooses an action and observes a feedback signal. Moreover, in each step, it can take a special action, c…
Rewards are sparse in the real world and most of today's reinforcement learning algorithms struggle with such sparsity. One solution to this problem is to allow the agent to create rewards for itself - thus making rewards dense and more suitable for learning. In particular, inspired by curious behaviour in animals, obs…
This paper addresses reward estimation and incentive design for agents with hidden rewards.
problem Estimating and incentivizing agents with unknown rewards in a learning setting.
method Repeated adverse selection game with a self-interested learning agent and a learning principal. Introduces an estimator for consistent reward estimation and a data-driven incentive policy.
result Finite-sample consistency of the estimator and a rigorous regret bound for the principal.
Increasing technological sophistication and widespread use of smartphones and wearable devices provide opportunities for innovative and highly personalized health interventions. A Just-In-Time Adaptive Intervention (JITAI) uses real-time data collection and communication capabilities of modern mobile devices to deliver…
A common approach for defining a reward function for Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) problems is the weighted sum of the multiple objectives. The weights are then treated as design parameters dependent on the expertise (and preference) of the person performing the learning, with the typical result that a …
In both the fields of computer science and medicine there is very strong interest in developing personalized treatment policies for patients who have variable responses to treatments. In particular, I aim to find an optimal personalized treatment policy which is a non-deterministic function of the patient specific cova…
An algorithm for efficient experimentation in a dynamic environment with personalized preferences and context drifts.
problem Efficiently recommending decisions to users with personalized preferences in a context where the environment is changing over time.
method Dri-MED, inspired from the linear version of the MED strategy, adapted to handle non-stationary heteroskedastic noise.
result The instance-dependent regret scales as $ ilde{\mathcal O}\left(\fracκ{ ildeΔ}d^2(\log(T)
ight)$, with ildeΔ being the constraint-aware sub-optimality gap.
Designing rewards for Reinforcement Learning (RL) is challenging because it needs to convey the desired task, be efficient to optimize, and be easy to compute. The latter is particularly problematic when applying RL to robotics, where detecting whether the desired configuration is reached might require considerable sup…
The paper tackles statistical and computational challenges in learning correlated reward models.
problem The Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA) assumption collapses human preferences into a universal utility function, leading to coarse approximations.
method The paper investigates the statistical and computational challenges of learning a correlated probit model using best-of-three preference data.
result Best-of-three preference data overcomes the limitations of pairwise preference data, allowing for more fine-grained modeling of human preferences.
Recent progress in artificial intelligence through reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great success on increasingly complex single-agent environments and two-player turn-based games. However, the real-world contains multiple agents, each learning and acting independently to cooperate and compete with other agents, a…
Though used extensively, the concept and process of machine learning (ML) personalization have generally received little attention from academics, practitioners, and the general public. We describe the ML approach as relying on the metaphor of the person as a feature vector and contrast this with humanistic views of th…