Related papers: Identifying Best Interventions through Online Impo…
Motivated by models of human decision making proposed to explain commonly observed deviations from conventional expected value preferences, we formulate two stochastic multi-armed bandit problems with distorted probabilities on the reward…
Motivated by a natural problem in online model selection with bandit information, we introduce and analyze a best arm identification problem in the rested bandit setting, wherein arm expected losses decrease with the number of times the arm…
We study the robust best-arm identification problem (RBAI) in the case of linear rewards. The primary objective is to identify a near-optimal robust arm, which involves selecting arms at every round and assessing their robustness by…
We study the fixed-budget best-arm identification (BAI) problem in non-stationary linear bandits. Concretely, given a fixed time budget $T\in \mathbb{N}$, finite arm set $\mathcal{X} \subset \mathbb{R}^d$, and a potentially adversarial…
Over the last two decades, we have seen extensive industrial research in the area of computational advertising. In this paper, our goal is to study the performance of various online learning algorithms to identify and display the best…
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…
We study best arm identification in a federated multi-armed bandit setting with a central server and multiple clients, when each client has access to a {\em subset} of arms and each arm yields independent Gaussian observations. The goal is…
While the objective in traditional multi-armed bandit problems is to find the arm with the highest mean, in many settings, finding an arm that best captures information about other arms is of interest. This objective, however, requires…
This work formulates model selection as an infinite-armed bandit problem, namely, a problem in which a decision maker iteratively selects one of an infinite number of fixed choices (i.e., arms) when the properties of each choice are only…
We address the problem of finding the maximizer of a nonlinear smooth function, that can only be evaluated point-wise, subject to constraints on the number of permitted function evaluations. This problem is also known as fixed-budget best…
This paper investigates a hitherto unaddressed aspect of best arm identification (BAI) in stochastic multi-armed bandits in the fixed-confidence setting. Two key metrics for assessing bandit algorithms are computational efficiency and…
We consider incentivized exploration: a version of multi-armed bandits where the choice of arms is controlled by self-interested agents, and the algorithm can only issue recommendations. The algorithm controls the flow of information, and…
We study the fixed-confidence best-arm identification problem in unimodal bandits, in which the means of the arms increase with the index of the arm up to their maximum, then decrease. We derive two lower bounds on the stopping time of any…
Multi-armed bandits are widely applied in scenarios like recommender systems, for which the goal is to maximize the click rate. However, more factors should be considered, e.g., user stickiness, user growth rate, user experience assessment,…
We study the problem of using causal models to improve the rate at which good interventions can be learned online in a stochastic environment. Our formalism combines multi-arm bandits and causal inference to model a novel type of bandit…
We propose a new strategy for best-arm identification with fixed confidence of Gaussian variables with bounded means and unit variance. This strategy, called Exploration-Biased Sampling, is not only asymptotically optimal: it is to the best…
We investigate an active pure-exploration setting, that includes best-arm identification, in the context of linear stochastic bandits. While asymptotically optimal algorithms exist for standard multi-arm bandits, the existence of such…
While classical formulations of multi-armed bandit problems assume that each arm's reward is independent and stationary, real-world applications often involve non-stationary environments and interdependencies between arms. In particular,…
Several sampling algorithms with variance reduction have been proposed for accelerating the training of Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs). However, due to the intractable computation of optimal sampling distribution, these sampling…
We introduce the functional bandit problem, where the objective is to find an arm that optimises a known functional of the unknown arm-reward distributions. These problems arise in many settings such as maximum entropy methods in natural…