Randomized Confidence Bounds for Stochastic Partial Monitoring
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The partial monitoring (PM) framework provides a theoretical formulation of sequential learning problems with incomplete feedback. On each round, a learning agent plays an action while the environment simultaneously chooses an outcome. The agent then observes a feedback signal that is only partially informative about the (unobserved) outcome. The agent leverages the received feedback signals to select actions that minimize the (unobserved) cumulative loss. In contextual PM, the outcomes depend on some side information that is observable by the agent before selecting the action on each round. In this paper, we consider the contextual and non-contextual PM settings with stochastic outcomes. We introduce a new class of PM strategies based on the randomization of deterministic confidence bounds. We also extend regret guarantees to settings where existing stochastic strategies are not applicable. Our experiments show that the proposed RandCBP and RandCBPsidestar strategies have favorable performance against state-of-the-art baselines in multiple PM games. To advocate for the adoption of the PM framework, we design a use case on the real-world problem of monitoring the error rate of any deployed classification system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.084 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".