Related papers: Cognitive Medium Access: Exploration, Exploitation…
Successful deployment of cognitive radios requires efficient sensing of the spectrum and dynamic adaptation of the available resources according to the sensed (imperfect) information. While most works design these two tasks separately, in…
We study exploration in Multi-Armed Bandits in a setting where $k$ players collaborate in order to identify an $\epsilon$-optimal arm. Our motivation comes from recent employment of bandit algorithms in computationally intensive,…
In cognitive radio (CR) networks, there are scenarios where the secondary (lower priority) users intend to communicate with each other by opportunistically utilizing the transmit spectrum originally allocated to the existing primary (higher…
Due mostly to its application to cognitive radio networks, multiplayer bandits gained a lot of interest in the last decade. A considerable progress has been made on its theoretical aspect. However, the current algorithms are far from…
We consider the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem and the contextual bandit problem with historical observations and pre-clustered arms. The historical observations can contain any number of instances for each arm, and the…
We study the evolution of information in interactive decision making through the lens of a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem. Focusing on a fundamental example where a unique optimal arm outperforms the rest by a fixed margin, we…
We consider a resource-aware variant of the classical multi-armed bandit problem: In each round, the learner selects an arm and determines a resource limit. It then observes a corresponding (random) reward, provided the (random) amount of…
The dynamic allocation problem, also known as the `multi-armed bandit' problem, simulates a situation in which an agent is faced with a tradeoff between actions that yield an immediate reward and actions whose benefits can only be perceived…
We consider the problem of allocating radio channels to links in a wireless network. Links interact through interference, modelled as a conflict graph (i.e., two interfering links cannot be simultaneously active on the same channel). We aim…
Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…
The stochastic contextual bandit problem, which models the trade-off between exploration and exploitation, has many real applications, including recommender systems, online advertising and clinical trials. As many other machine learning…
We study a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, where at each time step, the player observes an independently sampled context that determines the arms' mean rewards. However, playing an arm blocks it (across all contexts) for a…
The classical multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem involves a learner and a collection of K independent arms, each with its own ex ante unknown independent reward distribution. At each one of a finite number of rounds, the learner selects one…
We address the problem of opportunistic multiuser scheduling in downlink networks with Markov-modeled outage channels. We consider the scenario in which the scheduler does not have full knowledge of the channel state information, but…
In several applications such as clinical trials and financial portfolio optimization, the expected value (or the average reward) does not satisfactorily capture the merits of a drug or a portfolio. In such applications, risk plays a crucial…
We seek to take a different approach in deriving the optimal search policy for the repeated consumer search model found in Fishman and Rob (1995) with the main motivation of dropping the assumption of prior knowledge of the price…
How to best exploit patchy resources? This long-standing question belongs to the extensively studied class of explore/exploit problems that arise in a wide range of situations, from animal foraging, to robotic exploration, and to human…
In this paper, we study utilizing neural networks for the exploitation and exploration of contextual multi-armed bandits. Contextual multi-armed bandits have been studied for decades with various applications. To solve the…
We address the problem of identifying the optimal policy with a fixed confidence level in a multi-armed bandit setup, when \emph{the arms are subject to linear constraints}. Unlike the standard best-arm identification problem which is well…
Information and free-energy maximization are physics principles that provide general rules for an agent to optimize actions in line with specific goals and policies. These principles are the building blocks for designing decision-making…