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 formulate and study a novel multi-armed bandit problem called the qualitative dueling bandit (QDB) problem, where an agent observes not numeric but qualitative feedback by pulling each arm. We employ the same regret as the dueling bandit (DB) problem where the duel is carried out by comparing the qualitative feedbac…
Multi-armed bandit(MAB) problem is a reinforcement learning framework where an agent tries to maximise her profit by proper selection of actions through absolute feedback for each action. The dueling bandits problem is a variation of MAB problem in which an agent chooses a pair of actions and receives relative feedback…
The dueling bandit is a learning framework wherein the feedback information in the learning process is restricted to a noisy comparison between a pair of actions. In this research, we address a dueling bandit problem based on a cost function over a continuous space. We propose a stochastic mirror descent algorithm and …
New ranking algorithms are continually being developed and refined, necessitating the development of efficient methods for evaluating these rankers. Online ranker evaluation focuses on the challenge of efficiently determining, from implicit user feedback, which ranker out of a finite set of rankers is the best. Online …
In this paper, we present simple algorithms for Dueling Bandits. We prove that the algorithms have regret bounds for time horizon T of order O(T^rho ) with 1/2 <= rho <= 3/4, which importantly do not depend on any preference gap between actions, Delta. Dueling Bandits is an important extension of the Multi-Armed Bandit…
We study the K-armed dueling bandit problem, a variation of the standard stochastic bandit problem where the feedback is limited to relative comparisons of a pair of arms. We introduce a tight asymptotic regret lower bound that is based on the information divergence. An algorithm that is inspired by the Deterministic…
Efficiently identifies good policies by choosing contexts for human feedback.
problem Efficiently acquiring human feedback for preference alignment in large language models.
method Formalizes active exploration as a dueling bandit problem and proposes an active exploration algorithm with a polynomial worst-case regret bound.
result Proposed method outperforms baselines with limited human preferences on various language models and datasets.
We study the K-armed dueling bandit problem, a variation of the standard stochastic bandit problem where the feedback is limited to relative comparisons of a pair of arms. The hardness of recommending Copeland winners, the arms that beat the greatest number of other arms, is characterized by deriving an asymptotic regr…
In preference-based reinforcement learning (RL), an agent interacts with the environment while receiving preferences instead of absolute feedback. While there is increasing research activity in preference-based RL, the design of formal frameworks that admit tractable theoretical analysis remains an open challenge. Buil…
In machine learning, the notion of multi-armed bandits refers to a class of online learning problems, in which an agent is supposed to simultaneously explore and exploit a given set of choice alternatives in the course of a sequential decision process. In the standard setting, the agent learns from stochastic feedback …
We introduce the probably approximately correct (PAC) \emph{Battling-Bandit} problem with the Plackett-Luce (PL) subset choice model--an online learning framework where at each trial the learner chooses a subset of k arms from a fixed set of n arms, and subsequently observes a stochastic feedback indicating prefere…
In this paper, we propose a Double Thompson Sampling (D-TS) algorithm for dueling bandit problems. As indicated by its name, D-TS selects both the first and the second candidates according to Thompson Sampling. Specifically, D-TS maintains a posterior distribution for the preference matrix, and chooses the pair of arms…
The Thresholding Bandit Problem (TBP) aims to find the set of arms with mean rewards greater than a given threshold. We consider a new setting of TBP, where in addition to pulling arms, one can also \emph{duel} two arms and get the arm with a greater mean. In our motivating application from crowdsourcing, dueling two a…
This paper tackles combinatorial pure exploration for dueling bandits, aiming to find the best candidate-position match.
problem Finding the best candidate-position match in a dueling bandit setting.
method The paper adapts combinatorial pure exploration for multi-armed bandits to dueling bandits, considering both Borda winner and Condorcet winner cases. It designs PAC and exact algorithms for Borda winner and a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS) for Condorcet winner.
result The paper introduces the first algorithm with polynomial running time per round for identifying the Condorcet winner in CPE-DB.
We introduce the factored bandits model, which is a framework for learning with limited (bandit) feedback, where actions can be decomposed into a Cartesian product of atomic actions. Factored bandits incorporate rank-1 bandits as a special case, but significantly relax the assumptions on the form of the reward function…