Related papers: lil' UCB : An Optimal Exploration Algorithm for Mu…

We present a formal model of human decision-making in explore-exploit tasks using the context of multi-armed bandit problems, where the decision-maker must choose among multiple options with uncertain rewards. We address the standard…

We study the Pareto frontier of two archetypal objectives in multi-armed bandits, namely, regret minimization (RM) and best arm identification (BAI) with a fixed horizon. It is folklore that the balance between exploitation and exploration…

We consider the best arm identification (BAI) problem in the $K-$armed bandit framework with a modification - the agent is allowed to play a subset of arms at each time slot instead of one arm. Consequently, the agent observes the sample…

During online decision making in Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB), one needs to conduct inference on the true mean reward of each arm based on data collected so far at each step. However, since the arms are adaptively selected--thereby yielding…

This paper introduces the informational multi-armed bandit (IMAB) model in which at each round, a player chooses an arm, observes a symbol, and receives an unobserved reward in the form of the symbol's self-information. Thus, the expected…

We consider the query recommendation problem in closed loop interactive learning settings like online information gathering and exploratory analytics. The problem can be naturally modelled using the Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) framework with…

Due to the broad range of applications of stochastic multi-armed bandit model, understanding the effects of adversarial attacks and designing bandit algorithms robust to attacks are essential for the safe applications of this model. In this…

We consider a multi-armed bandit problem in which a set of arms is registered by each agent, and the agent receives reward when its arm is selected. An agent might strategically submit more arms with replications, which can bring more…

An automatic machine learning (AutoML) task is to select the best algorithm and its hyper-parameters simultaneously. Previously, the hyper-parameters of all algorithms are joint as a single search space, which is not only huge but also…

Traditional multi-armed bandit (MAB) formulations usually make certain assumptions about the underlying arms' distributions, such as bounds on the support or their tail behaviour. Moreover, such parametric information is usually 'baked'…

Contextual bandits aim to identify among a set of arms the optimal one with the highest reward based on their contextual information. Motivated by the fact that the arms usually exhibit group behaviors and the mutual impacts exist among…

We study online fair division when there are a finite number of item types and the player values for the items are drawn randomly from distributions with unknown means. In this setting, a sequence of indivisible items arrives according to a…

We study a variant of the classical stochastic $K$-armed bandit where observing the outcome of each arm is expensive, but cheap approximations to this outcome are available. For example, in online advertising the performance of an ad can be…

I present the first algorithm for stochastic finite-armed bandits that simultaneously enjoys order-optimal problem-dependent regret and worst-case regret. Besides the theoretical results, the new algorithm is simple, efficient and…

We present an efficient and generalised procedure to accurately identify the best (or near best) performing algorithm for each sub-task in a multi-problem domain. Our approach treats this as a set of best arm identification problems for…

Thompson sampling has become a ubiquitous approach to online decision problems with bandit feedback. The key algorithmic task for Thompson sampling is drawing a sample from the posterior of the optimal action. We propose an alternative arm…

We consider optimal sequential allocation in the context of the so-called stochastic multi-armed bandit model. We describe a generic index policy, in the sense of Gittins [J. R. Stat. Soc. Ser. B Stat. Methodol. 41 (1979) 148-177], based on…

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…

In this paper, we introduce a multi-armed bandit problem termed max-min grouped bandits, in which the arms are arranged in possibly-overlapping groups, and the goal is to find the group whose worst arm has the highest mean reward. This…

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,…