Related papers: Bandits with concave rewards and convex knapsacks
Existing contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms fail to effectively capture both long-term trends and local patterns across all arms, leading to suboptimal performance in environments with rapidly changing reward structures. They…
In retail, there are predictable yet dramatic time-dependent patterns in customer behavior, such as periodic changes in the number of visitors, or increases in customers just before major holidays. The current paradigm of multi-armed bandit…
We study the real-valued combinatorial pure exploration problem in the stochastic multi-armed bandit (R-CPE-MAB). We study the case where the size of the action set is polynomial with respect to the number of arms. In such a case, the…
In this study, we propose a new method for constructing UCB-type algorithms for stochastic multi-armed bandits based on general convex optimization methods with an inexact oracle. We derive the regret bounds corresponding to the convergence…
Many efficient algorithms with strong theoretical guarantees have been proposed for the contextual multi-armed bandit problem. However, applying these algorithms in practice can be difficult because they require domain expertise to build…
Reward-biased maximum likelihood estimation (RBMLE) is a classic principle in the adaptive control literature for tackling explore-exploit trade-offs. This paper studies the stochastic contextual bandit problem with general bounded reward…
The prevailing principle of "Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty" advocates for the incorporation of an exploration bonus, generally assumed to be proportional to the inverse square root of the visit count ($1/\sqrt{n}$), where $n$ is the…
In a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, an online algorithm makes a sequence of choices. In each round it chooses from a time-invariant set of alternatives and receives the payoff associated with this alternative. While the case of small…
The contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a widely used framework for problems requiring sequential decision-making under uncertainty, such as recommendation systems. In applications involving a large number of users, the performance of…
We investigate the use of bootstrapping in the bandit setting. We first show that the commonly used non-parametric bootstrapping (NPB) procedure can be provably inefficient and establish a near-linear lower bound on the regret incurred by…
We study the problem of minimising regret in two-armed bandit problems with Gaussian rewards. Our objective is to use this simple setting to illustrate that strategies based on an exploration phase (up to a stopping time) followed by…
The contextual bandit literature has traditionally focused on algorithms that address the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. In particular, greedy algorithms that exploit current estimates without any exploration may be sub-optimal in…
In this paper, we propose and study opportunistic contextual bandits - a special case of contextual bandits where the exploration cost varies under different environmental conditions, such as network load or return variation in…
We study sequential decision-making in batched nonparametric contextual bandits, where actions are selected over a finite horizon divided into a small number of batches. Motivated by constraints in domains such as medicine and marketing --…
Designing efficient exploration is central to Reinforcement Learning due to the fundamental problem posed by the exploration-exploitation dilemma. Bayesian exploration strategies like Thompson Sampling resolve this trade-off in a principled…
Modifying the reward-biased maximum likelihood method originally proposed in the adaptive control literature, we propose novel learning algorithms to handle the explore-exploit trade-off in linear bandits problems as well as generalized…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a classical problem that models sequential decision-making under uncertainty in reinforcement learning. In this study, we propose a new generalized upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithm (GWA-UCB1) by…
Multi-armed bandit problems are considered as a paradigm of the trade-off between exploring the environment to find profitable actions and exploiting what is already known. In the stationary case, the distributions of the rewards do not…
Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…
Bandit problems model the trade-off between exploration and exploitation in various decision problems. We study two-armed bandit problems in continuous time, where the risky arm can have two types: High or Low; both types yield stochastic…