Related papers: Value Directed Exploration in Multi-Armed Bandits …
We propose $\tt RandUCB$, a bandit strategy that builds on theoretically derived confidence intervals similar to upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms, but akin to Thompson sampling (TS), it uses randomization to trade off exploration and…
Large language models (LLMs) have been adopted to solve sequential decision-making tasks such as multi-armed bandits (MAB), in which an LLM is directly instructed to select the arms to pull in every iteration. However, this paradigm of…
Contextual dueling bandit is used to model the bandit problems, where a learner's goal is to find the best arm for a given context using observed noisy human preference feedback over the selected arms for the past contexts. However,…
This paper is about index policies for minimizing (frequentist) regret in a stochastic multi-armed bandit model, inspired by a Bayesian view on the problem. Our main contribution is to prove that the Bayes-UCB algorithm, which relies on…
We study Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits (CMABs) for non-episodic sequential decision making problems where the context includes both textual and numerical information (e.g., recommendation systems, dynamic portfolio adjustments, offer…
This work explores adaptations of successful multi-armed bandits policies to the online contextual bandits scenario with binary rewards using binary classification algorithms such as logistic regression as black-box oracles. Some of these…
We study contextual bandits in the presence of a stage-wise constraint when the constraint must be satisfied both with high probability and in expectation. We start with the linear case where both the reward function and the stage-wise…
Recommender systems are a ubiquitous feature of online platforms. Increasingly, they are explicitly tasked with increasing users' long-term satisfaction. In this context, we study a content exploration task, which we formalize as a…
Automating physical database design has remained a long-term interest in database research due to substantial performance gains afforded by optimised structures. Despite significant progress, a majority of today's commercial solutions are…
Consider a bandit algorithm that recommends actions to self-interested users in a recommendation system. The users are free to choose other actions and need to be incentivized to follow the algorithm's recommendations. While the users…
We consider a variant of the classic multi-armed bandit problem where the expected reward of each arm is a function of an unknown parameter. The arms are divided into different groups, each of which has a common parameter. Therefore, when…
The problem of combinatorial multi-armed bandits with probabilistically triggered arms (CMAB-T) has been extensively studied. Prior work primarily focuses on either the online setting where an agent learns about the unknown environment…
Although many algorithms for the multi-armed bandit problem are well-understood theoretically, empirical confirmation of their effectiveness is generally scarce. This paper presents a thorough empirical study of the most popular multi-armed…
We consider the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem and the contextual bandit problem with historical observations and pre-clustered arms. The historical observations can contain any number of instances for each arm, and the…
We consider a variant of the multi-armed bandit model, which we call multi-armed bandit problem with known trend, where the gambler knows the shape of the reward function of each arm but not its distribution. This new problem is motivated…
We investigate the challenging problem of adversarial multi-armed bandits operating under time-varying constraints, a scenario motivated by numerous real-world applications. To address this complex setting, we propose a novel primal-dual…
We develop a general theory to optimize the frequentist regret for sequential learning problems, where efficient bandit and reinforcement learning algorithms can be derived from unified Bayesian principles. We propose a novel optimization…
We consider a Kullback-Leibler-based algorithm for the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in the case of distributions with finite supports (not necessarily known beforehand), whose asymptotic regret matches the lower bound of…
Mixed-integer programming (MIP) is a powerful paradigm for modeling and solving various important combinatorial optimization problems. Recently, learning-based approaches have shown a potential to speed up MIP solving via offline training…
We consider a continuous time two-armed bandit problem in which incomes are described by Poissonian processes. We develop Bayesian approach with arbitrary prior distribution. We present two versions of recursive equation for determination…