SEMINARS

Who: Victor Boone

When: Wednesday, April 3, 14:00-15:00

Where: 447

What: Learning MDPs with Extended Bellman Operators

More: Efficiently learning Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) is difficult. When facing an unknown environment, where is the adequate limit between repeating actions that have shown their efficiency in the past (exploitation of your knowledge) and testing alternatives that may actually be better than what you currently believe (exploration of the environment)? To bypass this dilemma, a well-known solution is the "optimism-in-face-of-uncertainty" principle: Think of the score of an action as being the largest that is statistically plausible.

The exploration-exploitation dilemma then becomes the problem of tuning optimism. In this talk, I will explain how optimism in MDPs can be all rephrased using a single operator, embedding all the uncertainty in your environment within a single MDP. This is a story about "extended Bellman operators" and "extended MDPs", and about how one can achieve minimax optimal regret using this machinery.

Who: Charles Arnal

When: Thursday, April 11, 14:00-15:00

Where: 442

What: Mode Estimation with Partial Feedback

More: The combination of lightly supervised pre-training and online fine-tuning has played a key role in recent AI developments. These new learning pipelines call for new theoretical frameworks. In this paper, we formalize core aspects of weakly supervised and active learning with a simple problem: the estimation of the mode of a distribution using partial feedback. We show how entropy coding allows for optimal information acquisition from partial feedback, develop coarse sufficient statistics for mode identification, and adapt bandit algorithms to our new setting. Finally, we combine those contributions into a statistically and computationally efficient solution to our problem.

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