Related papers: Medoids in almost linear time via multi-armed band…
Adaptive designs for multi-armed clinical trials have become increasingly popular recently in many areas of medical research because of their potential to shorten development times and to increase patient response. However, developing…
Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) is NP-hard, and yet modern solvers often solve large real-world problems within minutes. This success can partially be attributed to heuristics. Since their behavior is highly instance-dependent, relying on…
In a multi-armed bandit problem, an online algorithm chooses from a set of strategies in a sequence of trials so as to maximize the total payoff of the chosen strategies. While the performance of bandit algorithms with a small finite…
Contextual multi-armed bandits are a popular choice to model sequential decision-making. E.g., in a healthcare application we may perform various tests to asses a patient condition (exploration) and then decide on the best treatment to give…
We consider a sequential assortment selection problem where the user choice is given by a multinomial logit (MNL) choice model whose parameters are unknown. In each period, the learning agent observes a $d$-dimensional contextual…
In this paper we consider the two-armed bandit problem, which often naturally appears per se or as a subproblem in some multi-armed generalizations, and serves as a starting point for introducing additional problem features. The…
The Greedy algorithm is the simplest heuristic in sequential decision problem that carelessly takes the locally optimal choice at each round, disregarding any advantages of exploring and/or information gathering. Theoretically, it is known…
Modern platforms leverage randomized experiments to make informed decisions from a given set of items (``treatments''). As a particularly challenging scenario, these items may (i) arrive in high volume, with thousands of new items being…
The Indexed Minimum Empirical Divergence (IMED) algorithm is a highly effective approach that offers a stronger theoretical guarantee of the asymptotic optimality compared to the Kullback--Leibler Upper Confidence Bound (KL-UCB) algorithm…
Smooth functions on graphs have wide applications in manifold and semi-supervised learning. In this work, we study a bandit problem where the payoffs of arms are smooth on a graph. This framework is suitable for solving online learning…
As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly popular, there is a growing need to predict which out of a set of LLMs will yield a successful answer to a given query at low cost. This problem promises to become even more relevant as…
The improving multi-armed bandits problem is a formal model for allocating effort under uncertainty, motivated by scenarios such as investing research effort into new technologies, performing clinical trials, and hyperparameter selection…
In the edge computing paradigm, mobile devices offload the computational tasks to an edge server by routing the required data over the wireless network. The full potential of edge computing becomes realized only if a smart device selects…
We consider the minimax setup for the two-armed bandit problem as applied to data processing if there are two alternative processing methods available with different a priori unknown efficiencies. One should determine the most effective…
In this paper, we consider a new Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem where arms are nodes in an unknown and possibly changing graph, and the agent (i) initiates random walks over the graph by pulling arms, (ii) observes the random walk…
Partitioning Around Medoids (PAM, k-Medoids) is a popular clustering technique to use with arbitrary distance functions or similarities, where each cluster is represented by its most central object, called the medoid or the discrete median.…
Performance of machine learning algorithms depends critically on identifying a good set of hyperparameters. While recent approaches use Bayesian optimization to adaptively select configurations, we focus on speeding up random search through…
We study finite-armed stochastic bandits where the rewards of each arm might be correlated to those of other arms. We introduce a novel phased algorithm that exploits the given structure to build confidence sets over the parameters of the…
This paper proposes a new algorithm, referred to as GMAB, that combines concepts from the reinforcement learning domain of multi-armed bandits and random search strategies from the domain of genetic algorithms to solve discrete stochastic…
This paper studies a multi-armed bandit (MAB) version of the range-searching problem. In its basic form, range searching considers as input a set of points (on the real line) and a collection of (real) intervals. Here, with each specified…