Related papers: Cheap Bandits
We study contextual bandits with budget and time constraints, referred to as constrained contextual bandits.The time and budget constraints significantly complicate the exploration and exploitation tradeoff because they introduce complex…
We study the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem in the presence of side-observations across actions that occur as a result of an underlying network structure. In our model, a bipartite graph captures the relationship between…
We consider the problem where M agents collaboratively interact with an instance of a stochastic K-armed contextual bandit, where K>>M. The goal of the agents is to simultaneously minimize the cumulative regret over all the agents over a…
Many applications require a learner to make sequential decisions given uncertainty regarding both the system's payoff function and safety constraints. In safety-critical systems, it is paramount that the learner's actions do not violate the…
Continuously learning and leveraging the knowledge accumulated from prior tasks in order to improve future performance is a long standing machine learning problem. In this paper, we study the problem in the multi-armed bandit framework with…
For traffic routing platforms, the choice of which route to recommend to a user depends on the congestion on these routes -- indeed, an individual's utility depends on the number of people using the recommended route at that instance.…
Safety is a desirable property that can immensely increase the applicability of learning algorithms in real-world decision-making problems. It is much easier for a company to deploy an algorithm that is safe, i.e., guaranteed to perform at…
We consider a novel multi-armed bandit framework where the rewards obtained by pulling the arms are functions of a common latent random variable. The correlation between arms due to the common random source can be used to design a…
Classic no-regret multi-armed bandit algorithms, including the Upper Confidence Bound (UCB), Hedge, and EXP3, are inherently unfair by design. Their unfairness stems from their objective of playing the most rewarding arm as frequently as…
We study the multi-armed bandit problem where the rewards are realizations of general non-stationary stochastic processes, a setting that generalizes many existing lines of work and analyses. In particular, we present a theoretical analysis…
We initiate the study of multi-stage episodic reinforcement learning under adversarial corruptions in both the rewards and the transition probabilities of the underlying system extending recent results for the special case of stochastic…
We investigate contextual bandits in the presence of side-observations across arms in order to design recommendation algorithms for users connected via social networks. Users in social networks respond to their friends' activity, and hence…
Multi-armed Bandit motivates methods with provable upper bounds on regret and also the counterpart lower bounds have been extensively studied in this context. Recently, Multi-agent Multi-armed Bandit has gained significant traction in…
We study an interesting variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, called the Fair-SMAB problem, where each arm is required to be pulled for at least a given fraction of the total available rounds. We investigate the interplay…
We study the contextual linear bandit problem, a version of the standard stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem where a learner sequentially selects actions to maximize a reward which depends also on a user provided per-round context.…
We study an important variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, which takes penalization into consideration. Instead of directly maximizing cumulative expected reward, we need to balance between the total reward and…
In this work, we extend the concept of the $p$-mean welfare objective from social choice theory (Moulin 2004) to study $p$-mean regret in stochastic multi-armed bandit problems. The $p$-mean regret, defined as the difference between the…
Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the strategy deployed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. Further, often we have only partial information on the state of the system. We study the…
In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective…
One of the key drivers of complexity in the classical (stochastic) multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is the difference between mean rewards in the top two arms, also known as the instance gap. The celebrated Upper Confidence Bound (UCB)…