Related papers: The Diverse Cohort Selection Problem
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 examine a multi-armed bandit problem with contextual information, where the objective is to ensure that each arm receives a minimum aggregated reward across contexts while simultaneously maximizing the total cumulative reward. This…
The Secretary problem is a classical sequential decision-making question that can be succinctly described as follows: a set of rank-ordered applicants are interviewed sequentially for a single position. Once an applicant is interviewed, an…
Pure exploration (aka active testing) is the fundamental task of sequentially gathering information to answer a query about a stochastic environment. Good algorithms make few mistakes and take few samples. Lower bounds (for multi-armed…
We study the Bandit Clustering (BC) problem under the fixed confidence setting, where the objective is to group a collection of data sequences (arms) into clusters through sequential sampling from adaptively selected arms at each time step…
We consider a bandit problem where at any time, the decision maker can add new arms to her consideration set. A new arm is queried at a cost from an "arm-reservoir" containing finitely many "arm-types," each characterized by a distinct mean…
A typical goal of research in combinatorial optimization is to come up with fast algorithms that find optimal solutions to a computational problem. The process that takes a real-world problem and extracts a clean mathematical abstraction of…
We study a general online combinatorial auction problem in algorithmic mechanism design. A provider allocates multiple types of capacity-limited resources to customers that arrive in a sequential and arbitrary manner. Each customer has a…
We study the real-valued combinatorial pure exploration of the multi-armed bandit in the fixed-budget setting. We first introduce the Combinatorial Successive Asign (CSA) algorithm, which is the first algorithm that can identify the best…
We investigate the hiring problem where a sequence of applicants is sequentially interviewed, and a decision on whether to hire an applicant is immediately made based on the applicant's score. For the maximal and average improvement…
We consider the best arm identification (BAI) problem in the $K-$armed bandit framework with a modification - the agent is allowed to play a subset of arms at each time slot instead of one arm. Consequently, the agent observes the sample…
Two general algorithms based on opportunity costs are given for approximating a revenue-maximizing set of bids an auctioneer should accept, in a combinatorial auction in which each bidder offers a price for some subset of the available…
Training machine learning models in a meaningful order, from the easy samples to the hard ones, using curriculum learning can provide performance improvements over the standard training approach based on random data shuffling, without any…
Given a vector of probability distributions, or arms, each of which can be sampled independently, we consider the problem of identifying the partition to which this vector belongs from a finitely partitioned universe of such vector of…
We study the problem of organizing a collection of objects - images, videos - into clusters, using crowdsourcing. This problem is notoriously hard for computers to do automatically, and even with crowd workers, is challenging to…
Despite the recent success of representation learning in sequential decision making, the study of the pure exploration scenario (i.e., identify the best option and minimize the sample complexity) is still limited. In this paper, we study…
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…
Today's top advertisers typically manage hundreds of campaigns simultaneously and consistently launch new ones throughout the year. A crucial challenge for marketing managers is determining the optimal allocation of limited budgets across…
In this paper, we study Contextual Unsupervised Sequential Selection (USS), a new variant of the stochastic contextual bandits problem where the loss of an arm cannot be inferred from the observed feedback. In our setup, arms are associated…
We study the submodular secretary problem with a cardinality constraint. In this problem, $n$ candidates for secretaries appear sequentially in random order. At the arrival of each candidate, a decision maker must irrevocably decide whether…