Related papers: Parallelizing Exploration-Exploitation Tradeoffs w…

The computational burden of running a complex computer model can make optimization impractical. Gaussian Processes (GPs) are statistical surrogates (also known as emulators) that alleviate this issue since they cheaply replace the computer…

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…

We propose $\tt RandUCB$, a bandit strategy that builds on theoretically derived confidence intervals similar to upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms, but akin to Thompson sampling (TS), it uses randomization to trade off exploration and…

Bayesian optimization offers the possibility of optimizing black-box operations not accessible through traditional techniques. The success of Bayesian optimization methods such as Expected Improvement (EI) are significantly affected by the…

The multi-armed bandit (MAB) model is one of the most classical models to study decision-making in an uncertain environment. In this model, a player chooses one of $K$ possible arms of a bandit machine to play at each time step, where the…

Efficient selection among multiple generative models is increasingly important in modern generative AI, where sampling from suboptimal models is costly. This problem can be formulated as a multi-armed bandit task. Under diversity-aware…

Recent works on the parallel complexity of Boosting have established strong lower bounds on the tradeoff between the number of training rounds $p$ and the total parallel work per round $t$. These works have also presented highly non-trivial…

We consider a sequential decision-making problem where an agent can take one action at a time and each action has a stochastic temporal extent, i.e., a new action cannot be taken until the previous one is finished. Upon completion, the…

Bandit based optimisation has a remarkable advantage over gradient based approaches due to their global perspective, which eliminates the danger of getting stuck at local optima. However, for continuous optimisation problems or problems…

Multi-objective optimization aims at finding trade-off solutions to conflicting objectives. These constitute the Pareto optimal set. In the context of expensive-to-evaluate functions, it is impossible and often non-informative to look for…

In this paper, we study the problem of Gaussian process (GP) bandits under relaxed optimization criteria stating that any function value above a certain threshold is "good enough". On the theoretical side, we study various {\em lenient…

Kernelized bandits, also known as Bayesian optimization (BO), has been a prevalent method for optimizing complicated black-box reward functions. Various BO algorithms have been theoretically shown to enjoy upper bounds on their cumulative…

We address the problem of online sequential decision making, i.e., balancing the trade-off between exploiting the current knowledge to maximize immediate performance and exploring the new information to gain long-term benefits using the…

We develop a probabilistic framework for analysing model-based reinforcement learning in the episodic setting. We then apply it to study finite-time horizon stochastic control problems with linear dynamics but unknown coefficients and…

Strategic behavior against sequential learning methods, such as "click framing" in real recommendation systems, have been widely observed. Motivated by such behavior we study the problem of combinatorial multi-armed bandits (CMAB) under…

Gaussian Process (GP) models have also become extremely useful for optimization under uncertainty algorithms, especially where the objective functions are costly to compute. Yet, the more classical methods usually adopt strategies that, in…

We consider the minimax setup for Gaussian one-armed bandit problem, i.e. the two-armed bandit problem with Gaussian distributions of incomes and known distribution corresponding to the first arm. This setup naturally arises when the…

In recent years, there has been renewed interest in closing the performance gap between state-of-the-art planning solvers and generalized planning (GP), a research area of AI that studies the automated synthesis of algorithmic-like…

We study a distributed decision-making problem in which multiple agents face the same multi-armed bandit (MAB), and each agent makes sequential choices among arms to maximize its own individual reward. The agents cooperate by sharing their…

The Greedy algorithm is the simplest heuristic in sequential decision problem that carelessly takes the locally optimal choice at each round, disregarding any advantages of exploring and/or information gathering. Theoretically, it is known…