Related papers: Gambler's Ruin Bandit Problem
We consider Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with deterministic transitions and study the problem of regret minimization, which is central to the analysis and design of optimal learning algorithms. We present logarithmic problem-specific…
We introduce and study a new class of stochastic bandit problems, referred to as predictive bandits. In each round, the decision maker first decides whether to gather information about the rewards of particular arms (so that their rewards…
This paper is in the field of stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits (MABs), i.e. those sequential selection techniques able to learn online using only the feedback given by the chosen option (a.k.a. $arm$). We study a particular case of the rested…
We consider a novel stochastic multi-armed bandit setting, where playing an arm makes it unavailable for a fixed number of time slots thereafter. This models situations where reusing an arm too often is undesirable (e.g. making the same…
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…
Motivated by the fact that humans like some level of unpredictability or novelty, and might therefore get quickly bored when interacting with a stationary policy, we introduce a novel non-stationary bandit problem, where the expected reward…
This work studies the problem of learning episodic Markov Decision Processes with known transition and bandit feedback. We develop the first algorithm with a ``best-of-both-worlds'' guarantee: it achieves $\mathcal{O}(log T)$ regret when…
Originally motivated by default risk management applications, this paper investigates a novel problem, referred to as the profitable bandit problem here. At each step, an agent chooses a subset of the K possible actions. For each action…
This paper aims to put forward the concept that learning to take safe actions in unknown environments, even with probability one guarantees, can be achieved without the need for an unbounded number of exploratory trials, provided that one…
We study the piecewise-stationary restless multi-armed bandit (PS-RMAB) problem, where each arm evolves as a Markov chain but \emph{mean rewards may change across unknown segments}. To address the resulting exploration--detection delay…
We consider the classical stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with a constraint that limits the total cost incurred by switching between actions to be no larger than a given switching budget. For this problem, we prove matching upper and…
We propose a novel combinatorial stochastic-greedy bandit (SGB) algorithm for combinatorial multi-armed bandit problems when no extra information other than the joint reward of the selected set of $n$ arms at each time step $t\in [T]$ is…
We study an infinite-armed bandit problem where actions' mean rewards are initially sampled from a reservoir distribution. Most prior works in this setting focused on stationary rewards (Berry et al., 1997; Wang et al., 2008; Bonald and…
This paper considers two fundamental sequential decision-making problems: the problem of prediction with expert advice and the multi-armed bandit problem. We focus on stochastic regimes in which an adversary may corrupt losses, and we…
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…
Autoregressive processes naturally arise in a large variety of real-world scenarios, including stock markets, sales forecasting, weather prediction, advertising, and pricing. When facing a sequential decision-making problem in such a…
Time-constrained decision processes have been ubiquitous in many fundamental applications in physics, biology and computer science. Recently, restart strategies have gained significant attention for boosting the efficiency of…
We study the stochastic Multiplayer Multi-Armed Bandit (MMAB) problem, where multiple players select arms to maximize their cumulative rewards. Collisions occur when two or more players select the same arm, resulting in no reward, and are…
In the combinatorial semi-bandit (CSB) problem, a player selects an action from a combinatorial action set and observes feedback from the base arms included in the action. While CSB is widely applicable to combinatorial optimization…
In this paper we present a model for the hidden Markovian bandit problem with linear rewards. As opposed to current work on Markovian bandits, we do not assume that the state is known to the decision maker before making the decision.…