Related papers: Bandit-Based Random Mutation Hill-Climbing
The multi-armed bandit problem is a core framework for sequential decision-making under uncertainty, but classical algorithms often fail in environments with hidden, time-varying states that confound reward estimation and optimal action…
In many web applications, a recommendation is not a single item suggested to a user but a list of possibly interesting contents that may be ranked in some contexts. The combinatorial bandit problem has been studied quite extensively these…
Random embedding has been applied with empirical success to large-scale black-box optimization problems with low effective dimensions. This paper proposes the EmbeddedHunter algorithm, which incorporates the technique in a hierarchical…
We study the problem of selecting a subset from a large action space shared by a family of bandits. In many natural situations, while the nominal set of actions is large, actions are highly correlated: many yield similar rewards across…
Recent advances in bandit tools and techniques for sequential learning are steadily enabling new applications and are promising the resolution of a range of challenging related problems. We study the game tree search problem, where the goal…
The contextual bandit has been identified as a powerful framework to formulate the recommendation process as a sequential decision-making process, where each item is regarded as an arm and the objective is to minimize the regret of $T$…
Modern stochastic optimization methods often rely on uniform sampling which is agnostic to the underlying characteristics of the data. This might degrade the convergence by yielding estimates that suffer from a high variance. A possible…
Learning the structure of a Bayesian Network (BN) with score-based solutions involves exploring the search space of possible graphs and moving towards the graph that maximises a given objective function. Some algorithms offer exact…
The random walk with choice is a well known variation to the random walk that first selects a subset of $d$ neighbours nodes and then decides to move to the node which maximizes the value of a certain metric; this metric captures the number…
Nearest Neighbors Algorithm is a Lazy Learning Algorithm, in which the algorithm tries to approximate the predictions with the help of similar existing vectors in the training dataset. The predictions made by the K-Nearest Neighbors…
We study a specific \textit{combinatorial pure exploration stochastic bandit problem} where the learner aims at finding the set of arms whose means are above a given threshold, up to a given precision, and \textit{for a fixed time horizon}.…
We propose the first fully-adaptive algorithm for pure exploration in linear bandits---the task to find the arm with the largest expected reward, which depends on an unknown parameter linearly. While existing methods partially or entirely…
In fixed budget bandit identification, an algorithm sequentially observes samples from several distributions up to a given final time. It then answers a query about the set of distributions. A good algorithm will have a small probability of…
Clustering bandits have gained significant attention in recommender systems by leveraging collaborative information from neighboring users to better capture target user preferences. However, these methods often lack a clear definition of…
In this paper we consider the adversarial contextual bandit problem in metric spaces. The paper "Nearest neighbour with bandit feedback" tackled this problem but when there are many contexts near the decision boundary of the comparator…
Unconscious bias has been shown to influence how we assess our peers, with consequences for hiring, promotions and admissions. In this work, we focus on affinity bias, the component of unconscious bias which leads us to prefer people who…
Variational quantum algorithms rely on the optimization of parameterized quantum circuits in noisy settings. The commonly used back-propagation procedure in classical machine learning is not directly applicable in this setting due to the…
Modifying the reward-biased maximum likelihood method originally proposed in the adaptive control literature, we propose novel learning algorithms to handle the explore-exploit trade-off in linear bandits problems as well as generalized…
Two-sided online matching platforms are employed in various markets. However, agents' preferences in the current market are usually implicit and unknown, thus needing to be learned from data. With the growing availability of dynamic side…
Higher-order mutation has the potential for improving major drawbacks of traditional first-order mutation, such as by simulating more realistic faults or improving test optimization techniques. Despite interest in studying promising…