Related papers: Pure Exploration for Multi-Armed Bandit Problems

We revisit lower bounds on the regret in the case of multi-armed bandit problems. We obtain non-asymptotic, distribution-dependent bounds and provide straightforward proofs based only on well-known properties of Kullback-Leibler…

Most bandit algorithm designs are purely theoretical. Therefore, they have strong regret guarantees, but also are often too conservative in practice. In this work, we pioneer the idea of algorithm design by minimizing the empirical Bayes…

We study a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where an agent is granted a free exploration budget before regret accumulates, a setting not captured by the classic regret minimization or pure exploration paradigms. The goal is to design…

We consider a stochastic bandit problem with countably many arms that belong to a finite set of types, each characterized by a unique mean reward. In addition, there is a fixed distribution over types which sets the proportion of each type…

Multi-armed bandit problems are the predominant theoretical model of exploration-exploitation tradeoffs in learning, and they have countless applications ranging from medical trials, to communication networks, to Web search and advertising.…

We consider best arm identification in the multi-armed bandit problem. Assuming certain continuity conditions of the prior, we characterize the rate of the Bayesian simple regret. Differing from Bayesian regret minimization (Lai, 1987), the…

In this paper we propose a general methodology to derive regret bounds for randomized multi-armed bandit algorithms. It consists in checking a set of sufficient conditions on the sampling probability of each arm and on the family of…

We solve the COLT 2013 open problem of \citet{SCB} on minimizing regret in the setting of advice-efficient multiarmed bandits with expert advice. We give an algorithm for the setting of K arms and N experts out of which we are allowed to…

We investigate the regret-minimisation problem in a multi-armed bandit setting with arbitrary corruptions. Similar to the classical setup, the agent receives rewards generated independently from the distribution of the arm chosen at each…

We study the distribution of regret in stochastic multi-armed bandits and episodic reinforcement learning through a unified framework. We formalize a distributional regret bound as a probabilistic guarantee that holds uniformly over all…

We consider the classical stochastic multi-armed bandit but where, from time to time and roughly with frequency $\epsilon$, an extra observation is gathered by the agent for free. We prove that, no matter how small $\epsilon$ is the agent…

We study the contextual multi-armed bandit problem with a finite context space (a.k.a. subpopulations), where the learner recommends a best action for each context and is evaluated by context-weighted simple regret. Our guarantees are…

Simple regret is a natural and parameter-free performance criterion for pure exploration in multi-armed bandits yet is less popular than the probability of missing the best arm or an $\epsilon$-good arm, perhaps due to lack of easy ways to…

Learning with expert advice and multi-armed bandit are two classic online decision problems which differ on how the information is observed in each round of the game. We study a family of problems interpolating the two. For a vector…

We study the impact of sharing exploration in multi-armed bandits in a grouped setting where a set of groups have overlapping feasible action sets [Baek and Farias '24]. In this grouped bandit setting, groups share reward observations, and…

We investigate the problem of cumulative regret minimization for individual sequence prediction with respect to the best expert in a finite family of size K under limited access to information. We assume that in each round, the learner can…

In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective…

This paper investigates stochastic and adversarial combinatorial multi-armed bandit problems. In the stochastic setting under semi-bandit feedback, we derive a problem-specific regret lower bound, and discuss its scaling with the dimension…

In this paper, we consider stochastic multi-armed bandits (MABs) with heavy-tailed rewards, whose $p$-th moment is bounded by a constant $\nu_{p}$ for $1<p\leq2$. First, we propose a novel robust estimator which does not require $\nu_{p}$…

This paper introduces and addresses a wide class of stochastic bandit problems where the function mapping the arm to the corresponding reward exhibits some known structural properties. Most existing structures (e.g. linear, Lipschitz,…