Related papers: Stochastic Process Bandits: Upper Confidence Bound…
We study reward maximisation in a wide class of structured stochastic multi-armed bandit problems, where the mean rewards of arms satisfy some given structural constraints, e.g. linear, unimodal, sparse, etc. Our aim is to develop methods…
The stochastic linear bandit problem proceeds in rounds where at each round the algorithm selects a vector from a decision set after which it receives a noisy linear loss parameterized by an unknown vector. The goal in such a problem is to…
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…
We study how to make decisions that minimize Bayesian regret in offline linear bandits. Prior work suggests that one must take actions with maximum lower confidence bound (LCB) on their reward. We argue that the reliance on LCB is…
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…
This paper considers stochastic linear bandits with general nonlinear constraints. The objective is to maximize the expected cumulative reward over horizon $T$ subject to a set of constraints in each round $\tau\leq T$. We propose a…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a widely used iterative black-box optimization method that utilizes Gaussian process (GP) surrogate models. In practice, BO is typically terminated after a fixed evaluation budget is exhausted, which can incur…
Multi-armed bandit problems are considered as a paradigm of the trade-off between exploring the environment to find profitable actions and exploiting what is already known. In the stationary case, the distributions of the rewards do not…
Although real-world decision-making problems can often be encoded as causal multi-armed bandits (CMABs) at different levels of abstraction, a general methodology exploiting the information and computational advantages of each abstraction…
We aim to optimize a black-box function $f:\mathcal{X} \mapsto \mathbb{R}$ under the assumption that $f$ is H\"older smooth and has bounded norm in the RKHS associated with a given kernel $K$. This problem is known to have an agnostic…
We consider the problem of optimizing an unknown (typically non-convex) function with a bounded norm in some Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS), based on noisy bandit feedback. We consider a novel variant of this problem in which the…
We consider the continuum-armed bandits problem, under a novel setting of recommending the best arms within a fixed budget under aggregated feedback. This is motivated by applications where the precise rewards are impossible or expensive to…
We study decentralized stochastic linear bandits, where a network of $N$ agents acts cooperatively to efficiently solve a linear bandit-optimization problem over a $d$-dimensional space. For this problem, we propose DLUCB: a fully…
Bayesian optimization usually assumes that a Bayesian prior is given. However, the strong theoretical guarantees in Bayesian optimization are often regrettably compromised in practice because of unknown parameters in the prior. In this…
Bayesian bandit algorithms with approximate Bayesian inference have been widely used in real-world applications. However, there is a large discrepancy between the superior practical performance of these approaches and their theoretical…
We study the corrupted bandit problem, i.e. a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with $k$ unknown reward distributions, which are heavy-tailed and corrupted by a history-independent adversary or Nature. To be specific, the reward…
We introduce a new stochastic smoothing perspective to study adversarial contextual bandit problems. We propose a general algorithm template that represents random perturbation based algorithms and identify several perturbation…
We consider a finite-armed structured bandit problem in which mean rewards of different arms are known functions of a common hidden parameter $\theta^*$. Since we do not place any restrictions of these functions, the problem setting…
The Gaussian process bandit is a problem in which we want to find a maximizer of a black-box function with the minimum number of function evaluations. If the black-box function varies with time, then time-varying Bayesian optimization is a…
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…