Related papers: Woodroofe's one-armed bandit problem revisited
We study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem and design new policies that enjoy both worst-case optimality for expected regret and light-tailed risk for regret distribution. Specifically, our policy design (i) enjoys the worst-case…
We study a generalization of the multi-armed bandit problem with multiple plays where there is a cost associated with pulling each arm and the agent has a budget at each time that dictates how much she can expect to spend. We derive an…
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…
We consider a class of restless bandit problems that finds a broad application area in reinforcement learning and stochastic optimization. We consider $N$ independent discrete-time Markov processes, each of which had two possible states: 1…
We consider the stochastic bandit problem in the sublinear space setting, where one cannot record the win-loss record for all $K$ arms. We give an algorithm using $O(1)$ words of space with regret \[ \sum_{i=1}^{K}\frac{1}{\Delta_i}\log…
In this paper, we study the problem of stochastic linear bandits with finite action sets. Most of existing work assume the payoffs are bounded or sub-Gaussian, which may be violated in some scenarios such as financial markets. To settle…
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 consider Bandits with Knapsacks (henceforth, BwK), a general model for multi-armed bandits under supply/budget constraints. In particular, a bandit algorithm needs to solve a well-known knapsack problem: find an optimal packing of items…
Continuously learning and leveraging the knowledge accumulated from prior tasks in order to improve future performance is a long standing machine learning problem. In this paper, we study the problem in the multi-armed bandit framework with…
Contextual bandits are a central framework for sequential decision-making, with applications ranging from recommendation systems to clinical trials. While nonparametric methods can flexibly model complex reward structures, they suffer from…
We consider a variant of the multi-armed bandit model, which we call multi-armed bandit problem with known trend, where the gambler knows the shape of the reward function of each arm but not its distribution. This new problem is motivated…
Drawing a sample from a discrete distribution is one of the building components for Monte Carlo methods. Like other sampling algorithms, discrete sampling suffers from the high computational burden in large-scale inference problems. We…
We consider a non-stationary formulation of the stochastic multi-armed bandit where the rewards are no longer assumed to be identically distributed. For the best-arm identification task, we introduce a version of Successive Elimination…
We study the optimal trade-off between expectation and tail risk for regret distribution in the stochastic multi-armed bandit model. We fully characterize the interplay among three desired properties for policy design: worst-case…
The pair-matching problem appears in many applications where one wants to discover good matches between pairs of entities or individuals. Formally, the set of individuals is represented by the nodes of a graph where the edges, unobserved at…
We consider the classical multi-armed bandit problem with Markovian rewards. When played an arm changes its state in a Markovian fashion while it remains frozen when not played. The player receives a state-dependent reward each time it…
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…
This paper studies the Bayesian regret of the Thompson Sampling algorithm for bandit problems, building on the information-theoretic framework introduced by Russo and Van Roy (2015). Specifically, it extends the rate-distortion analysis of…
In this study, we consider the infinitely many-armed bandit problems in a rested rotting setting, where the mean reward of an arm may decrease with each pull, while otherwise, it remains unchanged. We explore two scenarios regarding the…
We study multi-armed bandits under network interference, where each unit's reward depends on its own treatment and those of its neighbors in a given graph. This induces an exponentially large action space, making standard approaches…