Related papers: Stochastic Process Bandits: Upper Confidence Bound…
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)…
Multi-armed bandit models have proven to be useful in modeling many real world problems in the areas of control and sequential decision making with partial information. However, in many scenarios, such as those prevalent in healthcare and…
Confidence bounds are an essential tool for rigorously quantifying the uncertainty of predictions. They are a core component in many sequential learning and decision-making algorithms, with tighter confidence bounds giving rise to…
In this paper we propose the Augmented-UCB (AugUCB) algorithm for a fixed-budget version of the thresholding bandit problem (TBP), where the objective is to identify a set of arms whose quality is above a threshold. A key feature of AugUCB…
Bayesian optimization (BO) has been widely used to optimize expensive and black-box functions across various domains. However, existing BO methods have not addressed tensor-output functions. To fill this gap, we propose a novel…
Bayesian optimization has recently emerged as a popular method for the sample-efficient optimization of expensive black-box functions. However, the application to high-dimensional problems with several thousand observations remains…
We study finite-armed stochastic bandits where the rewards of each arm might be correlated to those of other arms. We introduce a novel phased algorithm that exploits the given structure to build confidence sets over the parameters of the…
We study best-arm identification (BAI) in the fixed-budget setting. Adaptive allocations based on upper confidence bounds (UCBs), such as UCBE, are known to work well in BAI. However, it is well-known that its optimal regret is…
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…
This paper investigates stochastic and adversarial combinatorial multi-armed bandit problems. In the stochastic setting under semi-bandit feedback, we derive a problem-specific regret lower bound, and discuss its scaling with the dimension…
Gaussian processes are a powerful framework for quantifying uncertainty and for sequential decision-making but are limited by the requirement of solving linear systems. In general, this has a cubic cost in dataset size and is sensitive to…
This work deals with parallel optimization of expensive objective functions which are modeled as sample realizations of Gaussian processes. The study is formalized as a Bayesian optimization problem, or continuous multi-armed bandit…
We study regret minimization in a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting and establish a fundamental trade-off between the regret suffered under an algorithm, and its statistical robustness. Considering broad classes of underlying arms'…
We consider a stochastic bandit problem with countably many arms that belong to a finite set of types, each characterized by a unique mean reward. In addition, there is a fixed distribution over types which sets the proportion of each type…
Constrained clustering leverages limited domain knowledge to improve clustering performance and interpretability, but incorporating pairwise must-link and cannot-link constraints is an NP-hard challenge, making global optimization…
Contextual bandits are widely used in Internet services from news recommendation to advertising, and to Web search. Generalized linear models (logistical regression in particular) have demonstrated stronger performance than linear models in…
UCT, a state-of-the art algorithm for Monte Carlo tree sampling (MCTS), is based on UCB, a sampling policy for the Multi-armed Bandit Problem (MAB) that minimizes the accumulated regret. However, MCTS differs from MAB in that only the final…
We present a provably optimal differentially private algorithm for the stochastic multi-arm bandit problem, as opposed to the private analogue of the UCB-algorithm [Mishra and Thakurta, 2015; Tossou and Dimitrakakis, 2016] which doesn't…
The widespread proliferation of data-driven decision-making has ushered in a recent interest in the design of privacy-preserving algorithms. In this paper, we consider the ubiquitous problem of gaussian process (GP) bandit optimization from…
In this paper, we discuss the asymptotic behavior of the Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithm in the context of multiarmed bandit problems and discuss its implication in downstream inferential tasks. While inferential tasks become…