Related papers: The Multi-Armed Bandit, with Constraints
Individual decision-makers consume information revealed by the previous decision makers, and produce information that may help in future decisions. This phenomenon is common in a wide range of scenarios in the Internet economy, as well as…
In this paper we consider the contextual multi-armed bandit problem for linear payoffs under a risk-averse criterion. At each round, contexts are revealed for each arm, and the decision maker chooses one arm to pull and receives the…
We analytically derive a class of optimal solutions to a linear program (LP) for automated mechanism design that satisfies efficiency, incentive compatibility, strong budget balance (SBB), and individual rationality (IR), where SBB and IR…
Bandit algorithms have various application in safety-critical systems, where it is important to respect the system constraints that rely on the bandit's unknown parameters at every round. In this paper, we formulate a linear stochastic…
We introduce the factored bandits model, which is a framework for learning with limited (bandit) feedback, where actions can be decomposed into a Cartesian product of atomic actions. Factored bandits incorporate rank-1 bandits as a special…
This brief paper presents simple simulation-based algorithms for obtaining an approximately optimal policy in a given finite set in large finite constrained Markov decision processes. The algorithms are adapted from playing strategies for…
The primary goal of my Ph.D. study is to develop provably efficient and practical algorithms for data-driven sequential decision-making under uncertainty. My work focuses on reinforcement learning (RL), multi-armed bandits, and their…
We address the problem of finding the maximizer of a nonlinear smooth function, that can only be evaluated point-wise, subject to constraints on the number of permitted function evaluations. This problem is also known as fixed-budget best…
Although many algorithms for the multi-armed bandit problem are well-understood theoretically, empirical confirmation of their effectiveness is generally scarce. This paper presents a thorough empirical study of the most popular multi-armed…
We study a multi-armed bandit problem with covariates in a setting where there is a possible delay in observing the rewards. Under some mild assumptions on the probability distributions for the delays and using an appropriate randomization…
The stochastic multi-armed bandit model is a simple abstraction that has proven useful in many different contexts in statistics and machine learning. Whereas the achievable limit in terms of regret minimization is now well known, our aim is…
This paper studies a multi-armed bandit problem where the decision-maker is loss averse, in particular she is risk averse in the domain of gains and risk loving in the domain of losses. The focus is on large horizons. Consequences of loss…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a classical online optimization model for the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. The traditional MAB is concerned with finding the arm that minimizes the mean cost. However, minimizing the mean…
Partially observable restless multi-armed bandits have found numerous applications including in recommendation systems, communication systems, public healthcare outreach systems, and in operations research. We study multi-action partially…
The objective of canonical multi-armed bandits is to identify and repeatedly select an arm with the largest reward, often in the form of the expected value of the arm's probability distribution. Such a utilitarian perspective and focus on…
In today's business marketplace, many high-tech Internet enterprises constantly explore innovative ways to provide optimal online user experiences for gaining competitive advantages. The great needs of developing intelligent interactive…
Algorithms for the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem play a central role in sequential decision-making and have been extensively explored both theoretically and numerically. While most classical approaches aim to identify the arm with the…
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…
We consider a multi-armed bandit problem with covariates. Given a realization of the covariate vector, instead of targeting the treatment with highest conditional expectation, the decision maker targets the treatment which maximizes a…
We investigate a Bayesian $k$-armed bandit problem in the \emph{many-armed} regime, where $k \geq \sqrt{T}$ and $T$ represents the time horizon. Initially, and aligned with recent literature on many-armed bandit problems, we observe that…