Related papers: Learning the distribution with largest mean: two b…
Sampling from distributions to find the one with the largest mean arises in a broad range of applications, and it can be mathematically modeled as a multi-armed bandit problem in which each distribution is associated with an arm. This paper…
In the infinite-armed bandit problem, each arm's average reward is sampled from an unknown distribution, and each arm can be sampled further to obtain noisy estimates of the average reward of that arm. Prior work focuses on identifying the…
In this paper, we study the problem of estimating uniformly well the mean values of several distributions given a finite budget of samples. If the variance of the distributions were known, one could design an optimal sampling strategy by…
Learning from prior tasks and transferring that experience to improve future performance is critical for building lifelong learning agents. Although results in supervised and reinforcement learning show that transfer may significantly…
This paper investigates the problem of best arm identification in $\textit{contaminated}$ stochastic multi-arm bandits. In this setting, the rewards obtained from any arm are replaced by samples from an adversarial model with probability…
Contextual bandits are a form of multi-armed bandit in which the agent has access to predictive side information (known as the context) for each arm at each time step, and have been used to model personalized news recommendation, ad…
Recently multi-armed bandit problem arises in many real-life scenarios where arms must be sampled in batches, due to limited time the agent can wait for the feedback. Such applications include biological experimentation and online…
We investigate the sample complexity of learning the optimal arm for multi-task bandit problems. Arms consist of two components: one that is shared across tasks (that we call representation) and one that is task-specific (that we call…
In this paper, we introduce a multi-armed bandit problem termed max-min grouped bandits, in which the arms are arranged in possibly-overlapping groups, and the goal is to find the group whose worst arm has the highest mean reward. This…
Learning paradigms based purely on offline data as well as those based solely on sequential online learning have been well-studied in the literature. In this paper, we consider combining offline data with online learning, an area less…
Active learning methods have shown great promise in reducing the number of samples necessary for learning. As automated learning systems are adopted into real-time, real-world decision-making pipelines, it is increasingly important that…
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…
Continuously learning and leveraging the knowledge accumulated from prior tasks in order to improve future performance is a long standing machine learning problem. In this paper, we study the problem in the multi-armed bandit framework with…
We consider the classic problem of $(\epsilon,\delta)$-PAC learning a best arm where the goal is to identify with confidence $1-\delta$ an arm whose mean is an $\epsilon$-approximation to that of the highest mean arm in a multi-armed bandit…
This paper studies active learning in the context of robust statistics. Specifically, we propose a variant of the Best Arm Identification problem for \emph{contaminated bandits}, where each arm pull has probability $\varepsilon$ of…
We consider the problem of best arm identification in a variant of multi-armed bandits called linked bandits. In a single interaction with linked bandits, multiple arms are played sequentially until one of them receives a positive reward.…
Adaptive and sequential experiment design is a well-studied area in numerous domains. We survey and synthesize the work of the online statistical learning paradigm referred to as multi-armed bandits integrating the existing research as a…
We consider regret minimization in a general collaborative multi-agent multi-armed bandit model, in which each agent faces a finite set of arms and may communicate with other agents through a central controller. The optimal arm for each…
Traditional multi-armed bandit (MAB) formulations usually make certain assumptions about the underlying arms' distributions, such as bounds on the support or their tail behaviour. Moreover, such parametric information is usually 'baked'…
We propose online algorithms for sequential learning in the contextual multi-armed bandit setting. Our approach is to partition the context space and then optimally combine all of the possible mappings between the partition regions and the…