Related papers: On the Optimal Amount of Experimentation in Sequen…
We consider a sequential decision-making problem where an agent can take one action at a time and each action has a stochastic temporal extent, i.e., a new action cannot be taken until the previous one is finished. Upon completion, 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…
We study a sequential resource allocation problem between a fixed number of arms. On each iteration the algorithm distributes a resource among the arms in order to maximize the expected success rate. Allocating more of the resource to a…
This paper studies a sequential decision problem where payoff distributions are known and where the riskiness of payoffs matters. Equivalently, it studies sequential choice from a repeated set of independent lotteries. The decision-maker is…
We study batched bandit experiments and consider the problem of inference conditional on the realized stopping time, assignment probabilities, and target parameter, where all of these may be chosen adaptively using information up to the…
In the multiarmed bandit problem a gambler chooses an arm of a slot machine to pull considering a tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. We study the stochastic bandit problem where each arm has a reward distribution supported in a…
In a fixed-confidence pure exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits, an algorithm iteratively samples arms and should stop as early as possible and return the correct answer to a query about the arms distributions. We are…
We investigate the adversarial bandit problem with multiple plays under semi-bandit feedback. We introduce a highly efficient algorithm that asymptotically achieves the performance of the best switching $m$-arm strategy with minimax optimal…
The celebrated multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory models the basic trade-off between exploration, or learning about the state of a system, and exploitation, or utilizing the system. In this paper we study the variant of the…
Sequential decision making under uncertainty is studied in a mixed observability domain. The goal is to maximize the amount of information obtained on a partially observable stochastic process under constraints imposed by a fully observable…
Time-constrained decision processes have been ubiquitous in many fundamental applications in physics, biology and computer science. Recently, restart strategies have gained significant attention for boosting the efficiency of…
We give a complete characterization of the complexity of best-arm identification in one-parameter bandit problems. We prove a new, tight lower bound on the sample complexity. We propose the `Track-and-Stop' strategy, which we prove to be…
Experimental design is an approach for selecting samples among a given set so as to obtain the best estimator for a given criterion. In the context of linear regression, several optimal designs have been derived, each associated with a…
Motivated by practical applications, chiefly clinical trials, we study the regret achievable for stochastic bandits under the constraint that the employed policy must split trials into a small number of batches. We propose a simple policy,…
We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting where reward must be actively queried for it to be observed. We provide tight lower and upper problem-dependent guarantees on both the regret and the number of queries. Interestingly, we…
This paper proposes near-optimal algorithms for the pure-exploration linear bandit problem in the fixed confidence and fixed budget settings. Leveraging ideas from the theory of suprema of empirical processes, we provide an algorithm whose…
Active learning methods have shown great promise in reducing the number of samples necessary for learning. As automated learning systems are adopted into real-time, real-world decision-making pipelines, it is increasingly important that…
We consider a simple optimal probabilistic problem solving strategy that searches through potential solution candidates in a specific order. We are interested in what impact has interchanging the order of two solution candidates with…
We consider a multi-hypothesis testing problem involving a K-armed bandit. Each arm's signal follows a distribution from a vector exponential family. The actual parameters of the arms are unknown to the decision maker. The decision maker…
For the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem from a constrained model that generalizes the classical one, we show that an asymptotic optimality is achievable by a simple strategy extended from the $\epsilon_t$-greedy strategy. We…