Related papers: Upper-Confidence-Bound Algorithms for Active Learn…
We study the distribution of regret in stochastic multi-armed bandits and episodic reinforcement learning through a unified framework. We formalize a distributional regret bound as a probabilistic guarantee that holds uniformly over all…
Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithms are a widely-used class of sequential algorithms for the $K$-armed bandit problem. Despite extensive research over the past decades aimed at understanding their asymptotic and (near) minimax…
We study the problem of training an accurate linear regression model by procuring labels from multiple noisy crowd annotators, under a budget constraint. We propose a Bayesian model for linear regression in crowdsourcing and use variational…
Many stochastic optimization algorithms work by estimating the gradient of the cost function on the fly by sampling datapoints uniformly at random from a training set. However, the estimator might have a large variance, which inadvertently…
We consider a resource-aware variant of the classical multi-armed bandit problem: In each round, the learner selects an arm and determines a resource limit. It then observes a corresponding (random) reward, provided the (random) amount of…
We study best arm identification in a variant of the multi-armed bandit problem where the learner has limited precision in arm selection. The learner can only sample arms via certain exploration bundles, which we refer to as boxes. In…
Sampling from the equilibrium distribution has always been a major problem in molecular simulations due to the very high dimensionality of conformational space. Over several decades, many approaches have been used to overcome the problem.…
The stochastic multi-arm bandit problem has been extensively studied under standard assumptions on the arm's distribution (e.g bounded with known support, exponential family, etc). These assumptions are suitable for many real-world problems…
In a fixed-confidence pure exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits, an algorithm iteratively samples arms and should stop as early as possible and return the correct answer to a query about the arms distributions. We are…
The sample mean is among the most well studied estimators in statistics, having many desirable properties such as unbiasedness and consistency. However, when analyzing data collected using a multi-armed bandit (MAB) experiment, the sample…
In bandit best-arm identification, an algorithm is tasked with finding the arm with highest mean reward with a specified accuracy as fast as possible. We study multi-fidelity best-arm identification, in which the algorithm can choose to…
Drawing a sample from a discrete distribution is one of the building components for Monte Carlo methods. Like other sampling algorithms, discrete sampling suffers from the high computational burden in large-scale inference problems. We…
We consider the distributed SGD problem, where a main node distributes gradient calculations among $n$ workers. By assigning tasks to all the workers and waiting only for the $k$ fastest ones, the main node can trade-off the algorithm's…
We consider the problem of deciding on sampling strategy, in particular sampling design. We propose a risk measure, whose minimizing value guides the choice. The method makes use of a superpopulation model and takes into account uncertainty…
We study the problem of learning revenue-optimal multi-bidder auctions from samples when the samples of bidders' valuations can be adversarially corrupted or drawn from distributions that are adversarially perturbed. First, we prove tight…
This paper studies how insurers can chose which claims to investigate for fraud. Given a prediction model, typically only claims with the highest predicted propability of being fraudulent are investigated. We argue that this can lead to…
In this article we consider the problem of choosing an optimal sampling scheme for the regression problem simultaneously with that of model selection. We consider a batch type approach and an on-line approach following algorithms recently…
We consider the combinatorial bandits problem with semi-bandit feedback under finite sampling budget constraints, in which the learner can carry out its action only for a limited number of times specified by an overall budget. The action is…
In this paper, we propose a cost-aware cascading bandits model, a new variant of multi-armed ban- dits with cascading feedback, by considering the random cost of pulling arms. In each step, the learning agent chooses an ordered list of…
A fundamental challenge for any intelligent system is prediction: given some inputs, can you predict corresponding outcomes? Most work on supervised learning has focused on producing accurate marginal predictions for each input. However, we…