No Arabic abstract
Over the past few years, the multi-armed bandit model has become increasingly popular in the machine learning community, partly because of applications including online content optimization. This paper reviews two different sequential learning tasks that have been considered in the bandit literature ; they can be formulated as (sequentially) learning which distribution has the highest mean among a set of distributions, with some constraints on the learning process. For both of them (regret minimization and best arm identification) we present recent, asymptotically optimal algorithms. We compare the behaviors of the sampling rule of each algorithm as well as the complexity terms associated to each problem.
Here we propose using the successor representation (SR) to accelerate learning in a constructive knowledge system based on general value functions (GVFs). In real-world settings like robotics for unstructured and dynamic environments, it is infeasible to model all meaningful aspects of a system and its environment by hand due to both complexity and size. Instead, robots must be capable of learning and adapting to changes in their environment and task, incrementally constructing models from their own experience. GVFs, taken from the field of reinforcement learning (RL), are a way of modeling the world as predictive questions. One approach to such models proposes a massive network of interconnected and interdependent GVFs, which are incrementally added over time. It is reasonable to expect that new, incrementally added predictions can be learned more swiftly if the learning process leverages knowledge gained from past experience. The SR provides such a means of separating the dynamics of the world from the prediction targets and thus capturing regularities that can be reused across multiple GVFs. As a primary contribution of this work, we show that using SR-based predictions can improve sample efficiency and learning speed in a continual learning setting where new predictions are incrementally added and learned over time. We analyze our approach in a grid-world and then demonstrate its potential on data from a physical robot arm.
Though learning has become a core technology of modern information processing, there is now ample evidence that it can lead to biased, unsafe, and prejudiced solutions. The need to impose requirements on learning is therefore paramount, especially as it reaches critical applications in social, industrial, and medical domains. However, the non-convexity of most modern learning problems is only exacerbated by the introduction of constraints. Whereas good unconstrained solutions can often be learned using empirical risk minimization (ERM), even obtaining a model that satisfies statistical constraints can be challenging, all the more so a good one. In this paper, we overcome this issue by learning in the empirical dual domain, where constrained statistical learning problems become unconstrained, finite dimensional, and deterministic. We analyze the generalization properties of this approach by bounding the empirical duality gap, i.e., the difference between our approximate, tractable solution and the solution of the original (non-convex)~statistical problem, and provide a practical constrained learning algorithm. These results establish a constrained counterpart of classical learning theory and enable the explicit use of constraints in learning. We illustrate this algorithm and theory in rate-constrained learning applications.
This paper deals with bandit online learning problems involving feedback of unknown delay that can emerge in multi-armed bandit (MAB) and bandit convex optimization (BCO) settings. MAB and BCO require only values of the objective function involved that become available through feedback, and are used to estimate the gradient appearing in the corresponding iterative algorithms. Since the challenging case of feedback with emph{unknown} delays prevents one from constructing the sought gradient estimates, existing MAB and BCO algorithms become intractable. For such challenging setups, delayed exploration, exploitation, and exponential (DEXP3) iterations, along with delayed bandit gradient descent (DBGD) iterations are developed for MAB and BCO, respectively. Leveraging a unified analysis framework, it is established that the regret of DEXP3 and DBGD are ${cal O}big( sqrt{Kbar{d}(T+D)} big)$ and ${cal O}big( sqrt{K(T+D)} big)$, respectively, where $bar{d}$ is the maximum delay and $D$ denotes the delay accumulated over $T$ slots. Numerical tests using both synthetic and real data validate the performance of DEXP3 and DBGD.
A standard assumption in contextual multi-arm bandit is that the true context is perfectly known before arm selection. Nonetheless, in many practical applications (e.g., cloud resource management), prior to arm selection, the context information can only be acquired by prediction subject to errors or adversarial modification. In this paper, we study a contextual bandit setting in which only imperfect context is available for arm selection while the true context is revealed at the end of each round. We propose two robust arm selection algorithms: MaxMinUCB (Maximize Minimum UCB) which maximizes the worst-case reward, and MinWD (Minimize Worst-case Degradation) which minimizes the worst-case regret. Importantly, we analyze the robustness of MaxMinUCB and MinWD by deriving both regret and reward bounds compared to an oracle that knows the true context. Our results show that as time goes on, MaxMinUCB and MinWD both perform as asymptotically well as their optimal counterparts that know the reward function. Finally, we apply MaxMinUCB and MinWD to online edge datacenter selection, and run synthetic simulations to validate our theoretical analysis.
In this paper we propose a new method to learn the underlying acyclic mixed graph of a linear non-Gaussian structural equation model given observational data. We build on an algorithm proposed by Wang and Drton, and we show that one can augment the hidden variable structure of the recovered model by learning {em multidirected edges} rather than only directed and bidirected ones. Multidirected edges appear when more than two of the observed variables have a hidden common cause. We detect the presence of such hidden causes by looking at higher order cumulants and exploiting the multi-trek rule. Our method recovers the correct structure when the underlying graph is a bow-free acyclic mixed graph with potential multi-directed edges.