Related papers: Analysis of Thompson Sampling for the multi-armed …
Thompson sampling (TS) has been known for its outstanding empirical performance supported by theoretical guarantees across various reward models in the classical stochastic multi-armed bandit problems. Nonetheless, its optimality is often…
We study the real-valued combinatorial pure exploration of the multi-armed bandit (R-CPE-MAB) problem. In R-CPE-MAB, a player is given $d$ stochastic arms, and the reward of each arm $s\in\{1, \ldots, d\}$ follows an unknown distribution…
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…
Thompson sampling provides a solution to bandit problems in which new observations are allocated to arms with the posterior probability that an arm is optimal. While sometimes easy to implement and asymptotically optimal, Thompson sampling…
Motivated by recommendation problems in music streaming platforms, we propose a nonstationary stochastic bandit model in which the expected reward of an arm depends on the number of rounds that have passed since the arm was last pulled.…
Motivated by models of human decision making proposed to explain commonly observed deviations from conventional expected value preferences, we formulate two stochastic multi-armed bandit problems with distorted probabilities on the reward…
We provide an approach for the analysis of randomised exploration algorithms like Thompson sampling that does not rely on forced optimism or posterior inflation. With this, we demonstrate that in the $d$-dimensional linear bandit setting,…
We study a variation of the classical multi-armed bandits problem. In this problem, the learner has to make a sequence of decisions, picking from a fixed set of choices. In each round, she receives as feedback only the loss incurred from…
We consider a combinatorial multi-armed bandit problem for maximum value reward function under maximum value and index feedback. This is a new feedback structure that lies in between commonly studied semi-bandit and full-bandit feedback…
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…
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 consider a novel stochastic multi-armed bandit setting, where playing an arm makes it unavailable for a fixed number of time slots thereafter. This models situations where reusing an arm too often is undesirable (e.g. making the same…
We study a decentralized cooperative stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with $K$ arms on a network of $N$ agents. In our model, the reward distribution of each arm is the same for each agent and rewards are drawn independently across…
Thompson Sampling is one of the most effective methods for contextual bandits and has been generalized to posterior sampling for certain MDP settings. However, existing posterior sampling methods for reinforcement learning are limited by…
We define and analyze a multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem in which decision-making agents can observe the choices and rewards of their neighbors under a linear observation cost. Neighbors are defined by a network graph that encodes the…
Multi-armed bandit problems are the most basic examples of sequential decision problems with an exploration-exploitation trade-off. This is the balance between staying with the option that gave highest payoffs in the past and exploring new…
We consider a novel multi-armed bandit framework where the rewards obtained by pulling the arms are functions of a common latent random variable. The correlation between arms due to the common random source can be used to design a…
We study an interesting variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, called the Fair-SMAB problem, where each arm is required to be pulled for at least a given fraction of the total available rounds. We investigate the interplay…
Algorithm selection is typically based on models of algorithm performance, learned during a separate offline training sequence, which can be prohibitively expensive. In recent work, we adopted an online approach, in which a performance…
Motivated by the challenges of edge inference, we study a variant of the cascade bandit model in which each arm corresponds to an inference model with an associated accuracy and error probability. We analyse four decision-making…