8 accepted papers
We consider the contextual bandit problem where at each time, the agent only has access to a noisy version of the context and the error variance (or an estimator of this variance). This setting is motivated by a wide range of applications where the true context for decision-making is unobserved, and…
Multitask Reinforcement Learning (MTRL) approaches have gained increasing attention for its wide applications in many important Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks. However, while recent advancements in MTRL theory have focused on the improved statistical efficiency by assuming a shared structure acro…
In this paper, we study a sequential decision-making problem, called Adaptive Sampling for Discovery (ASD). Starting with a large unlabeled dataset, algorithms for ASD adaptively label the points with the goal to maximize the sum of responses. This problem has wide applications to real-world discov…
Curriculum learning (CL) is a commonly used machine learning training strategy. However, we still lack a clear theoretical understanding of CL’s benefits. In this paper, we study the benefits of CL in the multitask linear regression problem under both structured and unstructured settings. For both s…
This paper studies the decision making problem with Funnel Structure. Funnel structure, a well-known concept in the marketing field, occurs in those systems where the decision maker interacts with the environment in a layered manner receiving far fewer observations from deep layers than shallow ones…
Recent papers on the theory of representation learning has shown the importance of a quantity called diversity when generalizing from a set of source tasks to a target task. Most of these papers assume that the function mapping shared representations to predictions is linear, for both source and tar…
We study reinforcement learning in non-episodic factored Markov decision processes (FMDPs). We propose two near-optimal and oracle-efficient algorithms for FMDPs. Assuming oracle access to an FMDP planner, they enjoy a Bayesian and a frequentist regret bound respectively, both of which reduce to the…
Molecular geometry prediction of flexible molecules, or conformer search, is a long-standing challenge in computational chemistry. This task is of great importance for predicting structure-activity relationships for a wide variety of substances ranging from biomolecules to ubiquitous materials. Subs…