Related papers: A more general Pandora's rule?
In this paper, we study the problem of outlier arm detection in multi-armed bandit settings, which finds plenty of applications in many high-impact domains such as finance, healthcare, and online advertising. For this problem, a learner…
Optimal mechanism design enjoys a beautiful and well-developed theory, and also a number of killer applications. Rules of thumb produced by the field influence everything from how governments sell wireless spectrum licenses to how the major…
Optimal mechanisms have been provided in quite general multi-item settings, as long as each bidder's type distribution is given explicitly by listing every type in the support along with its associated probability. In the implicit setting,…
Recommender systems are a ubiquitous feature of online platforms. Increasingly, they are explicitly tasked with increasing users' long-term satisfaction. In this context, we study a content exploration task, which we formalize as a…
We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting where reward must be actively queried for it to be observed. We provide tight lower and upper problem-dependent guarantees on both the regret and the number of queries. Interestingly, we…
We study multi-task representation learning for the problem of pure exploration in bilinear bandits. In bilinear bandits, an action takes the form of a pair of arms from two different entity types and the reward is a bilinear function of…
The construction by Du et al. (2019) implies that even if a learner is given linear features in $\mathbb R^d$ that approximate the rewards in a bandit with a uniform error of $\epsilon$, then searching for an action that is optimal up to…
Multi-armed bandit problems are the predominant theoretical model of exploration-exploitation tradeoffs in learning, and they have countless applications ranging from medical trials, to communication networks, to Web search and advertising.…
The staggering feats of AI systems have brought to attention the topic of AI Alignment: aligning a "superintelligent" AI agent's actions with humanity's interests. Many existing frameworks/algorithms in alignment study the problem on a…
The upper confidence bound (UCB) policy is recognized as an order-optimal solution for the classical total-reward bandit problem. While similar UCB-based approaches have been applied to the max bandit problem, which aims to maximize the…
We study an abstract optimal auction problem for a single good or service. This problem includes environments where agents have budgets, risk preferences, or multi-dimensional preferences over several possible configurations of the good…
A matroid is a notion of independence in combinatorial optimization which is closely related to computational efficiency. In particular, it is well known that the maximum of a constrained modular function can be found greedily if and only…
In this paper we consider the contextual multi-armed bandit problem for linear payoffs under a risk-averse criterion. At each round, contexts are revealed for each arm, and the decision maker chooses one arm to pull and receives the…
Identifying the best arm of a multi-armed bandit is a central problem in bandit optimization. We study a quantum computational version of this problem with coherent oracle access to states encoding the reward probabilities of each arm as…
In this paper, we discuss a stochastic decision problem of optimally selecting the order in which to try $n$ opportunities that may yield an uncertain reward in the future. The motivation came out from pure curiosity, after an informal…
We study the $\textit{single-index bandit}$ problem, where rewards depend on an unknown one-dimensional projection of high-dimensional contexts through an unknown reward function. This model extends linear and generalized linear bandits to…
We investigate the mechanism design problem faced by a principal who hires \emph{multiple} agents to gather and report costly information. Then, the principal exploits the information to make an informed decision. We model this problem as a…
Smooth functions on graphs have wide applications in manifold and semi-supervised learning. In this paper, we study a bandit problem where the payoffs of arms are smooth on a graph. This framework is suitable for solving online learning…
Motivated by drug design, we consider the best-arm identification problem in generalized linear bandits. More specifically, we assume each arm has a vector of covariates, there is an unknown vector of parameters that is common across the…
To make a joint decision, agents (or voters) are often required to provide their preferences as linear orders. To determine a winner, the given linear orders can be aggregated according to a voting protocol. However, in realistic settings,…