We often encounter situations in which an experimenter wants to find, by sequential experimentation, $x_{max} = \arg\max_{x} f(x)$, where $f(x)$ is a (possibly unknown) function of a well controllable variable $x$. Taking inspiration from physics and engineering, we have designed a new method to address this problem. In this paper, we first introduce the method in continuous time, and then present two algorithms for use in sequential experiments. Through a series of simulation studies, we show that the method is effective for finding maxima of unknown functions by experimentation, even when the maximum of the functions drifts or when the signal to noise ratio is low.
A Reduction-based Framework for Sequential Decision Making with Delayed Feedback
Center for Data Science, Peking University（北京大学数据科学中心）；Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）；National Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence（通用人工智能全国重点实验室）；School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University（北京大学智能科学与技术学院）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Breaking Feedback-Blindness: Utility-Augmented Transformer for Sequential Decision Making
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）；University of International Business and Economics（对外经济贸易大学）
