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Etienne Boursier

19 accepted papers

2026

Online Decision-Focused Learning

ICLR 2026poster

Decision-focused learning (DFL) is an increasingly popular paradigm for training predictive models whose outputs are used in decision-making tasks. Instead of merely optimizing for predictive accuracy, DFL trains models to directly minimize the loss associated with downstream decisions. However, exi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

A Theoretical Framework for Grokking: Interpolation followed by Riemannian Norm Minimisation

NeurIPS 2025poster

We study the dynamics of gradient flow with small weight decay on general training losses $F: \mathbb{R}^d \to \mathbb{R}$. Under mild regularity assumptions and assuming convergence of the unregularised gradient flow, we show that the trajectory with weight decay $\lambda$ exhibits a two-phase beha…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Approximate information maximization for bandit games

AISTATS 2025poster

Entropy maximization and free energy minimization are general physics principles for modeling dynamic systems. Notable examples include modeling decision-making within the brain using the free-energy principle, optimizing the accuracy-complexity trade-off when accessing hidden variables with the inf…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Prediction-Aware Learning in Multi-Agent Systems

ICML 2025poster

The framework of uncoupled online learning in multiplayer games has made significant progress in recent years. In particular, the development of time-varying games has considerably expanded its modeling capabilities. However, current regret bounds quickly become vacuous when the game undergoes sign…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Constant or Logarithmic Regret in Asynchronous Multiplayer Bandits with Limited Communication

AISTATS 2024poster

Multiplayer bandits have recently garnered significant attention due to their relevance in cognitive radio networks. While the existing body of literature predominantly focuses on synchronous players, real-world radio networks, such as those in IoT applications, often feature asynchronous (i.e., ran…

2024

First-order ANIL provably learns representations despite overparametrisation

ICLR 2024poster

Due to its empirical success in few-shot classification and reinforcement learning, meta-learning has recently received significant interest. Meta-learning methods leverage data from previous tasks to learn a new task in a sample-efficient manner. In particular, model-agnostic methods look for initi…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

Incentivized Learning in Principal-Agent Bandit Games

ICML 2024poster

This work considers a repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal can only interact with her environment through the agent. The principal and the agent have misaligned objectives and the choice of action is only left to the agent. However, the principal can influence the agent's decisi…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2024

Learning to Mitigate Externalities: the Coase Theorem with Hindsight Rationality

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

In Economics, the concept of externality refers to any indirect effect resulting from an interaction between players and affecting a third party without compensation. Most of the models within which externality has been studied assume that agents have perfect knowledge of their environment and prefe…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Unravelling in Collaborative Learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Collaborative learning offers a promising avenue for leveraging decentralized data. However, collaboration in groups of strategic learners is not a given. In this work, we consider strategic agents who wish to train a model together but have sampling distributions of different quality. The collabora…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2022

Gradient flow dynamics of shallow ReLU networks for square loss and orthogonal inputs

NeurIPS 2022accept

The training of neural networks by gradient descent methods is a cornerstone of the deep learning revolution. Yet, despite some recent progress, a complete theory explaining its success is still missing. This article presents, for orthogonal input vectors, a precise description of the gradient flow…

2021

Making the most of your day: online learning for optimal allocation of time

NeurIPS 2021poster

We study online learning for optimal allocation when the resource to be allocated is time. An agent receives task proposals sequentially according to a Poisson process and can either accept or reject a proposed task. If she accepts the proposal, she is busy for the duration of the task and obtains a…

2020

A Practical Algorithm for Multiplayer Bandits when Arm Means Vary Among Players

AISTATS 2020poster

We study a multiplayer stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in which players cannot communicate, and if two or more players pull the same arm, a collision occurs and the involved players receive zero reward. We consider the challenging heterogeneous setting, in which different arms may have differe…

Cited by 81SourcePDFScholar
2020

Statistical Efficiency of Thompson Sampling for Combinatorial Semi-Bandits

NeurIPS 2020poster

We investigate stochastic combinatorial multi-armed bandit with semi-bandit feedback (CMAB). In CMAB, the question of the existence of an efficient policy with an optimal asymptotic regret (up to a factor poly-logarithmic with the action size) is still open for many families of distributions, includ…

Cited by 48SourcePDFScholar
2019

SIC-MMAB: Synchronisation Involves Communication in Multiplayer Multi-Armed Bandits

NeurIPS 2019spotlight

Motivated by cognitive radio networks, we consider the stochastic multiplayer multi-armed bandit problem, where several players pull arms simultaneously and collisions occur if one of them is pulled by several players at the same stage. We present a decentralized algorithm that achieves the same pe…