Customer-obsessed science

We study the problem of Reinforcement Learning (RL) with linear function approximation, i.e. assuming the optimal action-value function is linear in a known d-dimensional feature mapping. Unfortunately, however, based on only this assumption, the worst case sample complexity has been shown to be exponential, even under a generative model. Instead of making further assumptions on the MDP or value functions

In order to identify expertise, forecasters should not be tested by their calibration score, which can always be made arbitrarily small, but rather by their Brier score. The Brier score is the sum of the calibration score and the refinement score; the latter measures how good the sorting into bins with the same forecast is, and thus attests to “expertise.” This raises the question of whether one can gain

In order to improve prices at Amazon, we created Pricing Labs, a price experimentation platform. Since we do not price discriminate, we must run product-randomized experiments. We discuss how we randomize to prevent spillovers, run different experimental designs (i.e., crossovers) to improve precision, and control for demand trends and differences in treatment groups to get more precise treatment effect

Incorporating neural networks into a video codec as an in-loop filter has been shown to provide significant improvements in coding efficiency. Unfortunately, the computational complexity associated with the neural network, specifically the number of multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations, makes these approaches intractable in practice. In this paper, we consider using a multiscale approach to reduce complexity

For service robots to become general-purpose in everyday household environments, they need not only a large library of primitive skills, but also the ability to quickly learn novel tasks specified by users. Fine-tuning neural networks on a variety of downstream tasks has been successful in many vision and language domains, but research is still limited on transfer learning between diverse long-horizon tasks