Experiment Planning with Function Approximation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Pacchiano, Aldo, Lee, Jonathan N., Brunskill, Emma
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Pacchiano, Aldo
Lee, Jonathan N.
Brunskill, Emma
author_facet Pacchiano, Aldo
Lee, Jonathan N.
Brunskill, Emma
contents We study the problem of experiment planning with function approximation in contextual bandit problems. In settings where there is a significant overhead to deploying adaptive algorithms -- for example, when the execution of the data collection policies is required to be distributed, or a human in the loop is needed to implement these policies -- producing in advance a set of policies for data collection is paramount. We study the setting where a large dataset of contexts but not rewards is available and may be used by the learner to design an effective data collection strategy. Although when rewards are linear this problem has been well studied, results are still missing for more complex reward models. In this work we propose two experiment planning strategies compatible with function approximation. The first is an eluder planning and sampling procedure that can recover optimality guarantees depending on the eluder dimension of the reward function class. For the second, we show that a uniform sampler achieves competitive optimality rates in the setting where the number of actions is small. We finalize our results introducing a statistical gap fleshing out the fundamental differences between planning and adaptive learning and provide results for planning with model selection.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_05193
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Experiment Planning with Function Approximation
Pacchiano, Aldo
Lee, Jonathan N.
Brunskill, Emma
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
We study the problem of experiment planning with function approximation in contextual bandit problems. In settings where there is a significant overhead to deploying adaptive algorithms -- for example, when the execution of the data collection policies is required to be distributed, or a human in the loop is needed to implement these policies -- producing in advance a set of policies for data collection is paramount. We study the setting where a large dataset of contexts but not rewards is available and may be used by the learner to design an effective data collection strategy. Although when rewards are linear this problem has been well studied, results are still missing for more complex reward models. In this work we propose two experiment planning strategies compatible with function approximation. The first is an eluder planning and sampling procedure that can recover optimality guarantees depending on the eluder dimension of the reward function class. For the second, we show that a uniform sampler achieves competitive optimality rates in the setting where the number of actions is small. We finalize our results introducing a statistical gap fleshing out the fundamental differences between planning and adaptive learning and provide results for planning with model selection.
title Experiment Planning with Function Approximation
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05193