Related papers: On ergodic two-armed bandits
We consider a bandit problem which involves sequential sampling from two populations (arms). Each arm produces a noisy reward realization which depends on an observable random covariate. The goal is to maximize cumulative expected reward.…
This paper investigates the problem of best arm identification in $\textit{contaminated}$ stochastic multi-arm bandits. In this setting, the rewards obtained from any arm are replaced by samples from an adversarial model with probability…
We study the problem of identifying the best arm in a multi-armed bandit environment when each arm is a time-homogeneous and ergodic discrete-time Markov process on a common, finite state space. The state evolution on each arm is governed…
We address the M-best-arm identification problem in multi-armed bandits. A player has a limited budget to explore K arms (M<K), and once pulled, each arm yields a reward drawn (independently) from a fixed, unknown distribution. The goal is…
We study the problem of best-arm identification with fixed confidence in stochastic linear bandits. The objective is to identify the best arm with a given level of certainty while minimizing the sampling budget. We devise a simple algorithm…
This paper presents a new exponential lower bound for the two most popular deterministic variants of the strategy improvement algorithms for solving parity, mean payoff, discounted payoff and simple stochastic games. The first variant…
We study two-armed Levy bandits in continuous-time, which have one safe arm that yields a constant payoff s, and one risky arm that can be either of type High or Low; both types yield stochastic payoffs generated by a Levy process. The…
Motivated by recursive learning in Markov Decision Processes, this paper studies best-arm identification in bandit problems where each arm's reward is drawn from a multinomial distribution with a known support. We compare the performance {…
We propose a bandit algorithm that explores by randomizing its history of rewards. Specifically, it pulls the arm with the highest mean reward in a non-parametric bootstrap sample of its history with pseudo rewards. We design the pseudo…
We study a multi-objective pure exploration problem in a multi-armed bandit model. Each arm is associated to an unknown multi-variate distribution and the goal is to identify the distributions whose mean is not uniformly worse than that of…
Motivated by applications such as online labor markets we consider a variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where we have a collection of arms representing strategic agents with different performance characteristics. The…
In this paper, we consider a bandit problem in which there are a number of groups each consisting of infinitely many arms. Whenever a new arm is requested from a given group, its mean reward is drawn from an unknown reservoir distribution…
During online decision making in Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB), one needs to conduct inference on the true mean reward of each arm based on data collected so far at each step. However, since the arms are adaptively selected--thereby yielding…
We introduce a novel multi-armed bandit framework, where each arm is associated with a fixed unknown credal set over the space of outcomes (which can be richer than just the reward). The arm-to-credal-set correspondence comes from a known…
We give nearly-tight upper and lower bounds for the improving multi-armed bandits problem. An instance of this problem has $k$ arms, each of whose reward function is a concave and increasing function of the number of times that arm has been…
We consider minimisation of dynamic regret in non-stationary bandits with a slowly varying property. Namely, we assume that arms' rewards are stochastic and independent over time, but that the absolute difference between the expected…
We investigate a Bayesian $k$-armed bandit problem in the \emph{many-armed} regime, where $k \geq \sqrt{T}$ and $T$ represents the time horizon. Initially, and aligned with recent literature on many-armed bandit problems, we observe that…
Decision making under uncertain environments in the maximization of expected reward while minimizing its risk is one of the ubiquitous problems in many subjects. Here, we introduce a novel problem setting in stochastic bandit optimization…
This paper presents an efficient algorithm to solve the sleeping bandit with multiple plays problem in the context of an online recommendation system. The problem involves bounded, adversarial loss and unknown i.i.d. distributions for arm…
Linear bandits have a wide variety of applications including recommendation systems yet they make one strong assumption: the algorithms must know an upper bound $S$ on the norm of the unknown parameter $\theta^*$ that governs the reward…