Related papers: Bandits with Knapsacks
This paper studies bandit problems where an agent has access to offline data that might be utilized to potentially improve the estimation of each arm's reward distribution. A major obstacle in this setting is the existence of compound…
We introduce a novel extension of the canonical multi-armed bandit problem that incorporates an additional strategic innovation: abstention. In this enhanced framework, the agent is not only tasked with selecting an arm at each time step,…
We study exploration in stochastic multi-armed bandits when we have access to a divisible resource that can be allocated in varying amounts to arm pulls. We focus in particular on the allocation of distributed computing resources, where we…
We consider the problem of contextual bandits and imitation learning, where the learner lacks direct knowledge of the executed action's reward. Instead, the learner can actively query an expert at each round to compare two actions and…
Many real-world problems like Social Influence Maximization face the dilemma of choosing the best $K$ out of $N$ options at a given time instant. This setup can be modeled as a combinatorial bandit which chooses $K$ out of $N$ arms at each…
In many platforms, user arrivals exhibit a self-reinforcing behavior: future user arrivals are likely to have preferences similar to users who were satisfied in the past. In other words, arrivals exhibit positive externalities. We study…
The piecewise-stationary bandit problem is an important variant of the multi-armed bandit problem that further considers abrupt changes in the reward distributions. The main theme of the problem is the trade-off between exploration for…
We study the constrained variant of the \emph{multi-armed bandit} (MAB) problem, in which the learner aims not only at minimizing the total loss incurred during the learning dynamic, but also at controlling the violation of multiple…
While classical formulations of multi-armed bandit problems assume that each arm's reward is independent and stationary, real-world applications often involve non-stationary environments and interdependencies between arms. In particular,…
Motivated by emerging applications such as live-streaming e-commerce, promotions and recommendations, we introduce and solve a general class of non-stationary multi-armed bandit problems that have the following two features: (i) the…
The stochastic $K$-armed bandit problem has been studied extensively due to its applications in various domains ranging from online advertising to clinical trials. In practice however, the number of arms can be very large resulting in large…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a widely researched area in artificial intelligence that focuses on teaching agents decision-making through interactions with their environment. A key subset includes stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) and…
We consider the framework of stochastic multi-armed bandit problems and study the possibilities and limitations of forecasters that perform an on-line exploration of the arms. These forecasters are assessed in terms of their simple regret,…
We consider the problem of reward maximization in the dueling bandit setup along with constraints on resource consumption. As in the classic dueling bandits, at each round the learner has to choose a pair of items from a set of $K$ items…
We study how to adapt to smoothly-varying ('easy') environments in well-known online learning problems where acquiring information is expensive. For the problem of label efficient prediction, which is a budgeted version of prediction with…
Motivated by practical applications, chiefly clinical trials, we study the regret achievable for stochastic bandits under the constraint that the employed policy must split trials into a small number of batches. We propose a simple policy,…
We introduce the problem of model selection for contextual bandits, where a learner must adapt to the complexity of the optimal policy while balancing exploration and exploitation. Our main result is a new model selection guarantee for…
We investigate contextual bandits in the presence of side-observations across arms in order to design recommendation algorithms for users connected via social networks. Users in social networks respond to their friends' activity, and hence…
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…
Learning paradigms based purely on offline data as well as those based solely on sequential online learning have been well-studied in the literature. In this paper, we consider combining offline data with online learning, an area less…