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.
Scarce data is a major challenge to scaling robot learning to truly complex tasks, as we need to generalize locally learned policies over different task contexts. Contextual policy search offers data-efficient learning and generalization by explicitly conditioning the policy on a parametric context space. In this paper…
Route Choice Models predict the route choices of travelers traversing an urban area. Most of the route choice models link route characteristics of alternative routes to those chosen by the drivers. The models play an important role in prediction of traffic levels on different routes and thus assist in development of ef…
Scarce data is a major challenge to scaling robot learning to truly complex tasks, as we need to generalize locally learned policies over different "contexts". Bayesian optimization approaches to contextual policy search (CPS) offer data-efficient policy learning that generalize over a context space. We propose to impr…
Study online pricing with contextual elasticity and heteroscedastic valuation.
problem Online contextual dynamic pricing with customer decision based on features and price.
method Introduced a novel approach to modeling customer demand with feature-based price elasticity and heteroscedastic noise. Proposed an efficient algorithm called Pricing with Perturbation (PwP).
result Proved an O(dTlogT) regret bound for the algorithm, matching a lower bound of Ω(dT).
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.
Shrunk sample covariance matrix is a factor model of a special form combining some (typically, style) risk factor(s) and principal components with a (block-)diagonal factor covariance matrix. As such, shrinkage, which essentially inherits out-of-sample instabilities of the sample covariance matrix, is not an alternativ…
GPE algorithm optimizes nonparametric contextual bandits with efficient regret bounds.
problem Optimizing nonparametric contextual bandits with efficient regret bounds.
method Inspired by Policy Elimination, GPE uses oracle-efficient techniques for nonparametric classes with infinite VC-dimension.
result GPE is regret-optimal for policy classes with integrable entropy, and for larger entropy, it provides an ε-greedy algorithm with matching regret bounds.
Building performance discrepancies between building design and operation are one of the causes that lead many new designs fail to achieve their goals and objectives. One of main factors contributing to the discrepancy is occupant behaviors. Occupants responding to a new design are influenced by several factors. Existin…
Contextual bandits are widely used in Internet services from news recommendation to advertising, and to Web search. Generalized linear models (logistical regression in particular) have demonstrated stronger performance than linear models in many applications where rewards are binary. However, most theoretical analyses …
We address the cold start problem in recommendation systems assuming no contextual information is available neither about users, nor items. We consider the case in which we only have access to a set of ratings of items by users. Most of the existing works consider a batch setting, and use cross-validation to tune param…
Thompson Sampling is one of the oldest heuristics for multi-armed bandit problems. It is a randomized algorithm based on Bayesian ideas, and has recently generated significant interest after several studies demonstrated it to have better empirical performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods. However, many ques…
We investigate contextual online learning with nonparametric (Lipschitz) comparison classes under different assumptions on losses and feedback information. For full information feedback and Lipschitz losses, we design the first explicit algorithm achieving the minimax regret rate (up to log factors). In a partial feedb…
Motivated by online recommendation and advertising systems, we consider a causal model for stochastic contextual bandits with a latent low-dimensional confounder. In our model, there are L observed contexts and K arms of the bandit. The observed context influences the reward obtained through a latent confounder var…
We study the sample complexity of model-based reinforcement learning (henceforth RL) in general contextual decision processes that require strategic exploration to find a near-optimal policy. We design new algorithms for RL with a generic model class and analyze their statistical properties. Our algorithms have sample …