Related papers: Bandit problems with Levy processes
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…
The stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is one of the most fundamental models in sequential decision-making, with the core challenge being the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Although algorithms such as Upper…
Motivated by applications in clinical trials and finance, we study the problem of online convex optimization (with bandit feedback) where the decision maker is risk-averse. We provide two algorithms to solve this problem. The first one is a…
In multi-armed bandits, the most-explored arms are the most informative, while reward maximization typically pulls only the best arm. We study the tradeoff between identifying arm means accurately and accumulating reward, and present an…
A recent work by Schlisselberg et al. (2024) studies a delay-as-payoff model for stochastic multi-armed bandits, where the payoff (either loss or reward) is delayed for a period that is proportional to the payoff itself. While this captures…
Over the past few years, the multi-armed bandit model has become increasingly popular in the machine learning community, partly because of applications including online content optimization. This paper reviews two different sequential…
Active learning methods have shown great promise in reducing the number of samples necessary for learning. As automated learning systems are adopted into real-time, real-world decision-making pipelines, it is increasingly important that…
We revisit the two-armed bandit (TAB) problem where both arms are driven by diffusive stochastic processes with a common instantaneous reward. We focus on situations where the Radon-Nikodym derivative between the transition probability…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a classic example of the exploration-exploitation dilemma. It is concerned with maximising the total rewards for a gambler by sequentially pulling an arm from a multi-armed slot machine where each arm…
We consider the problem of best arm identification in a variant of multi-armed bandits called linked bandits. In a single interaction with linked bandits, multiple arms are played sequentially until one of them receives a positive reward.…
Recently, bandit optimization has received significant attention in real-world safety-critical systems that involve repeated interactions with humans. While there exist various algorithms with performance guarantees in the literature,…
We study bandit best-arm identification with arbitrary and potentially adversarial rewards. A simple random uniform learner obtains the optimal rate of error in the adversarial scenario. However, this type of strategy is suboptimal when the…
We investigate the optimality of perturbation based algorithms in the stochastic and adversarial multi-armed bandit problems. For the stochastic case, we provide a unified regret analysis for both sub-Weibull and bounded perturbations when…
We study a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, where at each time step, the player observes an independently sampled context that determines the arms' mean rewards. However, playing an arm blocks it (across all contexts) for a…
The improving multi-armed bandits problem is a formal model for allocating effort under uncertainty, motivated by scenarios such as investing research effort into new technologies, performing clinical trials, and hyperparameter selection…
Many important optimization problems, such as the minimum spanning tree and minimum-cost flow, can be solved optimally by a greedy method. In this work, we study a learning variant of these problems, where the model of the problem is…
We study the best-arm identification problem in linear bandit, where the rewards of the arms depend linearly on an unknown parameter $\theta^*$ and the objective is to return the arm with the largest reward. We characterize the complexity…
We investigate a Bayesian $k$-armed bandit problem in the \emph{many-armed} regime, where $k \geq \sqrt{T}$ and $T$ represents the time horizon. Initially, and aligned with recent literature on many-armed bandit problems, we observe that…
Bandit algorithms are guaranteed to solve diverse sequential decision-making problems, provided that a sufficient exploration budget is available. However, learning from scratch is often too costly for personalization tasks where a single…
Recent work has considered natural variations of the multi-armed bandit problem, where the reward distribution of each arm is a special function of the time passed since its last pulling. In this direction, a simple (yet widely applicable)…