An Empirical Study of Neural Kernel Bandits
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Neural bandits have enabled practitioners to operate efficiently on problems with non-linear reward functions. While in general contextual bandits commonly utilize Gaussian process (GP) predictive distributions for decision making, the most successful neural variants use only the last layer parameters in the derivation. Research on neural kernels (NK) has recently established a correspondence between deep networks and GPs that take into account all the parameters of a NN and can be trained more efficiently than most Bayesian NNs. We propose to directly apply NK-induced distributions to guide an upper confidence bound or Thompson sampling-based policy. We show that NK bandits achieve state-of-the-art performance on highly non-linear structured data. Furthermore, we analyze practical considerations such as training frequency and model partitioning. We believe our work will help better understand the impact of utilizing NKs in applied settings.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it