Related papers: Identifying Best Interventions through Online Impo…
In this paper, we introduce a new online decision making paradigm that we call Thresholding Graph Bandits. The main goal is to efficiently identify a subset of arms in a multi-armed bandit problem whose means are above a specified…
Best arm identification (or, pure exploration) in multi-armed bandits is a fundamental problem in machine learning. In this paper we study the distributed version of this problem where we have multiple agents, and they want to learn the…
We study the problem of identifying the best arm in a multi-armed bandit environment when each arm is a time-homogeneous and ergodic discrete-time Markov process on a common, finite state space. The state evolution on each arm is governed…
The problem of identifying important players in a given network is of pivotal importance for viral marketing, public health management, network security and various other fields of social network analysis. In this work we find the most…
Many real-world functions are defined over both categorical and category-specific continuous variables and thus cannot be optimized by traditional Bayesian optimization (BO) methods. To optimize such functions, we propose a new method that…
While reinforcement learning algorithms have made significant progress in solving multi-armed bandit problems, they often lack biological plausibility in architecture and dynamics. Here, we propose a bio-inspired neural model based on…
In this paper, we consider a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, MAB with cost subsidy, which models many real-life applications where the learning agent has to pay to select an arm and is concerned about optimizing…
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…
We study best-arm identification in stochastic multi-armed bandits under the fixed-confidence setting, focusing on instances with multiple optimal arms. Unlike prior work that addresses the unknown-number-of-optimal-arms case, we consider…
Fixed-budget best-arm identification (BAI) is a bandit problem where the agent maximizes the probability of identifying the optimal arm within a fixed budget of observations. In this work, we study this problem in the Bayesian setting. We…
We study the best-arm identification problem with fixed confidence when contextual (covariate) information is available in stochastic bandits. Although we can use contextual information in each round, we are interested in the marginalized…
This paper studies bandit problems where an agent has access to offline data that might be utilized to potentially improve the estimation of each arm's reward distribution. A major obstacle in this setting is the existence of compound…
We study the best arm identification (BAI) problem with potentially biased offline data in the fixed confidence setting, which commonly arises in real-world scenarios such as clinical trials. We prove an impossibility result for adaptive…
The best arm identification problem (BEST-1-ARM) is the most basic pure exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits. The problem has a long history and attracted significant attention for the last decade. However, we do not yet…
We consider the bandit problem of selecting $K$ out of $N$ arms at each time step. The reward can be a non-linear function of the rewards of the selected individual arms. The direct use of a multi-armed bandit algorithm requires choosing…
We investigate the fixed-budget best-arm identification (BAI) problem for linear bandits in a potentially non-stationary environment. Given a finite arm set $\mathcal{X}\subset\mathbb{R}^d$, a fixed budget $T$, and an unpredictable sequence…
We consider the problem of identifying the best arm in a multi-armed bandit model. Despite a wealth of literature in the traditional fixed budget and fixed confidence regimes of the best arm identification problem, it still remains a…
We study the problem of selecting $K$ arms with the highest expected rewards in a stochastic $n$-armed bandit game. This problem has a wide range of applications, e.g., A/B testing, crowdsourcing, simulation optimization. Our goal is to…
Best-arm identification (BAI) in a fixed-budget setting is a bandit problem where the learning agent maximizes the probability of identifying the optimal (best) arm after a fixed number of observations. Most works on this topic study…
Influence maximization (IM) is a fundamental problem in complex network analysis, with a wide range of real-world applications. To date, existing approaches to influential node identification in IM have predominantly relied on standard…