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.
Contextual policy search allows adapting robotic movement primitives to different situations. For instance, a locomotion primitive might be adapted to different terrain inclinations or desired walking speeds. Such an adaptation is often achievable by modifying a small number of hyperparameters. However, learning, when …
We study contextual search, a generalization of binary search in higher dimensions, which captures settings such as feature-based dynamic pricing. Standard formulations of this problem assume that agents act in accordance with a specific homogeneous response model. In practice, however, some responses may be adversaria…
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…
Direct contextual policy search methods learn to improve policy parameters and simultaneously generalize these parameters to different context or task variables. However, learning from high-dimensional context variables, such as camera images, is still a prominent problem in many real-world tasks. A naive application o…
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…
Contextual policy search (CPS) is a class of multi-task reinforcement learning algorithms that is particularly useful for robotic applications. A recent state-of-the-art method is Contextual Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategies (C-CMA-ES). It is based on the standard black-box optimization algorithm CMA-ES…
Methods for learning to search for structured prediction typically imitate a reference policy, with existing theoretical guarantees demonstrating low regret compared to that reference. This is unsatisfactory in many applications where the reference policy is suboptimal and the goal of learning is to improve upon it. Ca…
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 propose an estimator and confidence interval for computing the value of a policy from off-policy data in the contextual bandit setting. To this end we apply empirical likelihood techniques to formulate our estimator and confidence interval as simple convex optimization problems. Using the lower bound of our confiden…
Optimizing an interactive system against a predefined online metric is particularly challenging, when the metric is computed from user feedback such as clicks and payments. The key challenge is the counterfactual nature: in the case of Web search, any change to a component of the search engine may result in a different…
In automatic speech recognition (ASR) what a user says depends on the particular context she is in. Typically, this context is represented as a set of word n-grams. In this work, we present a novel, all-neural, end-to-end (E2E) ASR sys- tem that utilizes such context. Our approach, which we re- fer to as Contextual Lis…
In this paper, the problem of maximizing a black-box function f:X→R is studied in the Bayesian framework with a Gaussian Process (GP) prior. In particular, a new algorithm for this problem is proposed, and high probability bounds on its simple and cumulative regret are established. The query po…
Techniques for data-mining, latent semantic analysis, contextual search of databases, etc. have long ago been developed by computer scientists working on information retrieval (IR). Experimental scientists, from all disciplines, having to analyse large collections of raw experimental data (astronomical, physical, biolo…
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.
Thompson Sampling bounds for contextual bandits with sub-Gaussian rewards.
problem Improving the performance of Thompson Sampling in contextual bandits with sub-Gaussian rewards.
method Proved comprehensive bounds on Thompson Sampling expected cumulative regret based on mutual information and lifted information ratio for sub-Gaussian rewards.
result Explicit regret bounds for various contextual bandit scenarios.
A method for unsupervised contextual anomaly detection is proposed using a cross-linked pair of Variational Auto-Encoders for assigning a normality score to an observation. The method enables a distinct separation of contextual from behavioral attributes and is robust to the presence of anomalous or novel contextual at…
We consider the stochastic linear (multi-armed) contextual bandit problem with the possibility of hidden simple multi-armed bandit structure in which the rewards are independent of the contextual information. Algorithms that are designed solely for one of the regimes are known to be sub-optimal for the alternate regime…