Related papers: Fractional Moments on Bandit Problems
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…
Decision-making problems of sequential nature, where decisions made in the past may have an impact on the future, are used to model many practically important applications. In some real-world applications, feedback about a decision is…
In several applications such as clinical trials and financial portfolio optimization, the expected value (or the average reward) does not satisfactorily capture the merits of a drug or a portfolio. In such applications, risk plays a crucial…
Learning in multi-player games can model a large variety of practical scenarios, where each player seeks to optimize its own local objective function, which at the same time relies on the actions taken by others. Motivated by the frequent…
We consider the problem of online fair division of indivisible goods to players when there are a finite number of types of goods and player values are drawn from distributions with unknown means. Our goal is to maximize social welfare…
Multi-armed bandits (MAB) model sequential decision making problems, in which a learner sequentially chooses arms with unknown reward distributions in order to maximize its cumulative reward. Most of the prior work on MAB assumes that the…
In this paper, we propose a novel perturbation-based exploration method in bandit algorithms with bounded or unbounded rewards, called residual bootstrap exploration (\texttt{ReBoot}). The \texttt{ReBoot} enforces exploration by injecting…
We study a novel multi-armed bandit problem that models the challenge faced by a company wishing to explore new strategies to maximize revenue whilst simultaneously maintaining their revenue above a fixed baseline, uniformly over time.…
This work formulates model selection as an infinite-armed bandit problem, namely, a problem in which a decision maker iteratively selects one of an infinite number of fixed choices (i.e., arms) when the properties of each choice are only…
Solutions to address the periodic review inventory control problem with nonstationary random demand, lost sales, and stochastic vendor lead times typically involve making strong assumptions on the dynamics for either approximation or…
We study the problem of online learning in Stackelberg games with side information between a leader and a sequence of followers. In every round the leader observes contextual information and commits to a mixed strategy, after which the…
We provide the first oracle efficient sublinear regret algorithms for adversarial versions of the contextual bandit problem. In this problem, the learner repeatedly makes an action on the basis of a context and receives reward for the…
We consider the problem of designing an allocation rule or an "online learning algorithm" for a class of bandit problems in which the set of control actions available at each time $s$ is a convex, compact subset of $\mathbb{R}^d$. Upon…
We study the task of bandit learning, also known as best-arm identification, under the assumption that the true reward function f belongs to a known, but arbitrary, function class F. We seek a general theory of bandit learnability, akin to…
In this work, we investigate the problem of adapting to the presence or absence of causal structure in multi-armed bandit problems. In addition to the usual reward signal, we assume the learner has access to additional variables, observed…
Many real-world bandit applications are characterized by sparse rewards, which can significantly hinder learning efficiency. Leveraging problem-specific structures for careful distribution modeling is recognized as essential for improving…
We study linear contextual bandits with access to a large, confounded, offline dataset that was sampled from some fixed policy. We show that this problem is closely related to a variant of the bandit problem with side information. We…
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.…
In this paper, we study a new decision-making problem called the bandit max-min fair allocation (BMMFA) problem. The goal of this problem is to maximize the minimum utility among agents with additive valuations by repeatedly assigning…
We introduce the safe linear stochastic bandit framework---a generalization of linear stochastic bandits---where, in each stage, the learner is required to select an arm with an expected reward that is no less than a predetermined (safe)…