Related papers: Doing Better Than UCT: Rational Monte Carlo Sampli…

In many problem settings, most notably in game playing, an agent receives a possibly delayed reward for its actions. Often, those rewards are handcrafted and not naturally given. Even simple terminal-only rewards, like winning equals one…

Despite its groundbreaking success in Go and computer games, Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is computationally expensive as it requires a substantial number of rollouts to construct the search tree, which calls for effective…

The PhD thesis of Maillard (2013) presents a rather obscure algorithm for the $K$-armed bandit problem. This less-known algorithm, which we call Maillard sampling (MS), computes the probability of choosing each arm in a \textit{closed…

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), most famously used in game-play artificial intelligence (e.g., the game of Go), is a well-known strategy for constructing approximate solutions to sequential decision problems. Its primary innovation is the…

We consider Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) applied to Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and Partially Observable MDPs (POMDPs), and the well-known Upper Confidence bound for Trees (UCT) algorithm. In UCT, a tree with nodes (states) and edges…

The multi-armed bandit problems have been studied mainly under the measure of expected total reward accrued over a horizon of length $T$. In this paper, we address the issue of risk in multi-armed bandit problems and develop parallel…

We study Thompson Sampling algorithms for stochastic multi-armed bandits in the batched setting, in which we want to minimize the regret over a sequence of arm pulls using a small number of policy changes (or, batches). We propose two…

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) efficiently balances exploration and exploitation in tree search based on count-derived uncertainty. However, these local visit counts ignore a second type of uncertainty induced by the size of the subtree…

Motivated by wireless networks where interference or channel state estimates provide partial insight into throughput, we study a variant of the classical stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in which the learner has limited access to…

The problem of bandit with graph feedback generalizes both the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem and the learning with expert advice problem by encoding in a directed graph how the loss vector can be observed in each round of the game. The…

We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting and study the problem of constrained regret minimization over a given time horizon. Each arm is associated with an unknown, possibly multi-dimensional distribution, and the merit of an arm…

Thompson sampling for multi-armed bandit problems is known to enjoy favorable performance in both theory and practice. However, it suffers from a significant limitation computationally, arising from the need for samples from posterior…

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…

The literature on bandit learning and regret analysis has focused on contexts where the goal is to converge on an optimal action in a manner that limits exploration costs. One shortcoming imposed by this orientation is that it does not…

The multi-armed bandit problem is a popular model for studying exploration/exploitation trade-off in sequential decision problems. Many algorithms are now available for this well-studied problem. One of the earliest algorithms, given by W.…

This paper studies a new variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandits problem where auxiliary information about the arm rewards is available in the form of control variates. In many applications like queuing and wireless networks, the arm…

We obtain the upper bound of the loss function for a strategy in the multi-armed bandit problem with Gaussian distributions of incomes. Considered strategy is an asymptotic generalization of the strategy proposed by J. Bather for the…

We study how to learn optimal interventions sequentially given causal information represented as a causal graph along with associated conditional distributions. Causal modeling is useful in real world problems like online advertisement…

Multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems are widely applied to online optimization tasks that require balancing exploration and exploitation. In practical scenarios, these tasks often involve multiple conflicting objectives, giving rise to…

In this paper, we formulate the multi-agent graph bandit problem as a multi-agent extension of the graph bandit problem introduced by Zhang, Johansson, and Li [CISS 57, 1-6 (2023)]. In our formulation, $N$ cooperative agents travel on a…