Related papers: Exploration vs Exploitation vs Safety: Risk-averse…
Existing frameworks for evaluating and comparing generative models consider an offline setting, where the evaluator has access to large batches of data produced by the models. However, in practical scenarios, the goal is often to identify…
Database activity monitoring (DAM) systems are commonly used by organizations to protect the organizational data, knowledge and intellectual properties. In order to protect organizations database DAM systems have two main roles, monitoring…
We propose and study Collpasing Bandits, a new restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) setting in which each arm follows a binary-state Markovian process with a special structure: when an arm is played, the state is fully observed, thus…
Sharpe Ratio (SR) is a critical parameter in characterizing financial time series as it jointly considers the reward and the volatility of any stock/portfolio through its variance. Deriving online algorithms for optimizing the SR is…
We consider the channel access problem in a multi-channel opportunistic communication system with imperfect channel sensing, where the state of each channel evolves as a non independent and identically distributed Markov process. This…
We introduce and study a new variant of the multi-armed bandit problem (MAB), called the survival bandit problem (S-MAB). While in both problems, the objective is to maximize the so-called cumulative reward, in this new variant, the…
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…
We study the stochastic Multiplayer Multi-Armed Bandit (MMAB) problem, where multiple players select arms to maximize their cumulative rewards. Collisions occur when two or more players select the same arm, resulting in no reward, and are…
Sequential portfolio selection has attracted increasing interests in the machine learning and quantitative finance communities in recent years. As a mathematical framework for reinforcement learning policies, the stochastic multi-armed…
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…
Mobile Context-Aware Recommender Systems can be naturally modelled as an exploration/exploitation trade-off (exr/exp) problem, where the system has to choose between maximizing its expected rewards dealing with its current knowledge…
This paper introduces the framework of multi-armed sampling, which serves as the sampling counterpart to the optimization problem of multi-armed bandits. Our primary motivation is to rigorously examine the exploration-exploitation trade-off…
Remote education has proliferated in the twenty-first century, yielding rise to intelligent tutoring systems. In particular, research has found multi-armed bandit (MAB) intelligent tutors to have notable abilities in traversing the…
We study the impact of sharing exploration in multi-armed bandits in a grouped setting where a set of groups have overlapping feasible action sets [Baek and Farias '24]. In this grouped bandit setting, groups share reward observations, and…
Multi-armed bandit problems (MABPs) are a special type of optimal control problem well suited to model resource allocation under uncertainty in a wide variety of contexts. Since the first publication of the optimal solution of the classic…
When multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms allocate pulls among competing arms, the resulting allocation can exhibit huge variation. This is particularly harmful in modern applications such as learning-enhanced platform operations and…
Restless multi-armed bandits (RMABs) generalize the multi-armed bandits where each arm exhibits Markovian behavior and transitions according to their transition dynamics. Solutions to RMAB exist for both offline and online cases. However,…
In a typical stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, the objective is often to maximize the expected sum of rewards over some time horizon $T$. While the choice of a strategy that accomplishes that is optimal with no additional information,…
Bandit optimization usually refers to the class of online optimization problems with limited feedback, namely, a decision maker uses only the objective value at the current point to make a new decision and does not have access to the…
Pure exploration is one of the fundamental problems in multi-armed bandits (MAB). However, existing works mostly focus on specific pure exploration tasks, without a holistic view of the general pure exploration problem. This work fills this…