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Policy inference plays an essential role in the contextual bandit problem. In this paper, we use empirical likelihood to develop a Bayesian inference method for the joint analysis of multiple contextual bandit policies in finite sample…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-12 Jiangrong Ouyang , Mingming Gong , Howard Bondell

We describe and develop a close relationship between two problems that have customarily been regarded as distinct: that of maximizing entropy, and that of minimizing worst-case expected loss. Using a formulation grounded in the equilibrium…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2007-06-13 Peter D. Grunwald , A. Philip Dawid

The problem of assigning probability distributions which objectively reflect the prior information available about experiments is one of the major stumbling blocks in the use of Bayesian methods of data analysis. In this paper the method of…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2009-11-10 Ariel Caticha , Roland Preuss

We develop a general theory to optimize the frequentist regret for sequential learning problems, where efficient bandit and reinforcement learning algorithms can be derived from unified Bayesian principles. We propose a novel optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Yunbei Xu , Assaf Zeevi

This paper is about index policies for minimizing (frequentist) regret in a stochastic multi-armed bandit model, inspired by a Bayesian view on the problem. Our main contribution is to prove that the Bayes-UCB algorithm, which relies on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-07 Emilie Kaufmann

We consider the minimax setup for Gaussian one-armed bandit problem, i.e. the two-armed bandit problem with Gaussian distributions of incomes and known distribution corresponding to the first arm. This setup naturally arises when the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-01-28 Alexander Kolnogorov

We propose ${\tt AdaTS}$, a Thompson sampling algorithm that adapts sequentially to bandit tasks that it interacts with. The key idea in ${\tt AdaTS}$ is to adapt to an unknown task prior distribution by maintaining a distribution over its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-28 Soumya Basu , Branislav Kveton , Manzil Zaheer , Csaba Szepesvári

We investigate the adversarial bandit problem with multiple plays under semi-bandit feedback. We introduce a highly efficient algorithm that asymptotically achieves the performance of the best switching $m$-arm strategy with minimax optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-02 N. Mert Vural , Hakan Gokcesu , Kaan Gokcesu , Suleyman S. Kozat

This paper is devoted to regret lower bounds in the classical model of stochastic multi-armed bandit. A well-known result of Lai and Robbins, which has then been extended by Burnetas and Katehakis, has established the presence of a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2011-12-19 Antoine Salomon , Jean-Yves Audibert , Issam El Alaoui

The minmax regret problem for combinatorial optimization under uncertainty can be viewed as a zero-sum game played between an optimizing player and an adversary, where the optimizing player selects a solution and the adversary selects costs…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2014-09-23 Andrew Mastin , Patrick Jaillet , Sang Chin

We present simple and efficient algorithms for the batched stochastic multi-armed bandit and batched stochastic linear bandit problems. We prove bounds for their expected regrets that improve over the best-known regret bounds for any number…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Hossein Esfandiari , Amin Karbasi , Abbas Mehrabian , Vahab Mirrokni

In this paper we propose a general methodology to derive regret bounds for randomized multi-armed bandit algorithms. It consists in checking a set of sufficient conditions on the sampling probability of each arm and on the family of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-14 Dorian Baudry , Kazuya Suzuki , Junya Honda

We study the stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem under worst-case regret and heavy-tailed reward distribution. We modify the minimax policy MOSS for the sub-Gaussian reward distribution by using saturated empirical mean to design a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-19 Lai Wei , Vaibhav Srivastava

We develop a new approach to obtaining high probability regret bounds for online learning with bandit feedback against an adaptive adversary. While existing approaches all require carefully constructing optimistic and biased loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-02 Chung-Wei Lee , Haipeng Luo , Chen-Yu Wei , Mengxiao Zhang

We develop a meta-learning framework for simple regret minimization in bandits. In this framework, a learning agent interacts with a sequence of bandit tasks, which are sampled i.i.d.\ from an unknown prior distribution, and learns its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Mohammadjavad Azizi , Branislav Kveton , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Sumeet Katariya

We revisit the classic regret-minimization problem in the stochastic multi-armed bandit setting when the arm-distributions are allowed to be heavy-tailed. Regret minimization has been well studied in simpler settings of either bounded…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Shubhada Agrawal , Sandeep Juneja , Wouter M. Koolen

We demonstrate that the principle of maximum relative entropy (ME), used judiciously, can ease the specification of priors in model selection problems. The resulting effect is that models that make sharp predictions are disfavoured,…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2009-12-07 Brendon J. Brewer , Matthew J. Francis

We study repeated two-player games where one of the players, the learner, employs a no-regret learning strategy, while the other, the optimizer, is a rational utility maximizer. We consider general Bayesian games, where the payoffs of both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-19 Yishay Mansour , Mehryar Mohri , Jon Schneider , Balasubramanian Sivan

Building on the framework introduced by Xu and Raginksy [1] for supervised learning problems, we study the best achievable performance for model-based Bayesian reinforcement learning problems. With this purpose, we define minimum Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Amaury Gouverneur , Borja Rodríguez-Gálvez , Tobias J. Oechtering , Mikael Skoglund

Multi-armed bandit problems are the most basic examples of sequential decision problems with an exploration-exploitation trade-off. This is the balance between staying with the option that gave highest payoffs in the past and exploring new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-11-06 Sébastien Bubeck , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi