Related papers: Information Directed Sampling and Bandits with Het…
We study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in the case when the arm samples are dependent over time and generated from so-called weak $\cC$-mixing processes. We establish a $\cC-$Mix Improved UCB agorithm and provide both…
We consider a special case of bandit problems, named batched bandits, in which an agent observes batches of responses over a certain time period. Unlike previous work, we consider a more practically relevant batch-centric scenario of batch…
We obtain essentially tight upper bounds for a strengthened notion of regret in the stochastic linear bandits framework. The strengthening -- referred to as Nash regret -- is defined as the difference between the (a priori unknown) optimum…
We study the problem of federated stochastic multi-arm contextual bandits with unknown contexts, in which M agents are faced with different bandits and collaborate to learn. The communication model consists of a central server and the…
In stochastic contextual bandits, an agent sequentially makes actions from a time-dependent action set based on past experience to minimize the cumulative regret. Like many other machine learning algorithms, the performance of bandits…
I present the first algorithm for stochastic finite-armed bandits that simultaneously enjoys order-optimal problem-dependent regret and worst-case regret. Besides the theoretical results, the new algorithm is simple, efficient and…
In this paper we propose a novel experimental design-based algorithm to minimize regret in online stochastic linear and combinatorial bandits. While existing literature tends to focus on optimism-based algorithms--which have been shown to…
The Lipschitz bandit problem extends stochastic bandits to a continuous action set defined over a metric space, where the expected reward function satisfies a Lipschitz condition. In this work, we introduce a new problem of Lipschitz bandit…
We study how to adapt to smoothly-varying ('easy') environments in well-known online learning problems where acquiring information is expensive. For the problem of label efficient prediction, which is a budgeted version of prediction with…
We introduce algorithms that achieve state-of-the-art \emph{dynamic regret} bounds for non-stationary linear stochastic bandit setting. It captures natural applications such as dynamic pricing and ads allocation in a changing environment.…
Information-directed sampling (IDS) has recently demonstrated its potential as a data-efficient reinforcement learning algorithm. However, it is still unclear what is the right form of information ratio to optimize when contextual…
This work addresses the mediator feedback problem, a bandit game where the decision set consists of a number of policies, each associated with a probability distribution over a common space of outcomes. Upon choosing a policy, the learner…
We consider a generalization of stochastic bandits where the set of arms, $\cX$, is allowed to be a generic measurable space and the mean-payoff function is "locally Lipschitz" with respect to a dissimilarity function that is known to the…
Online model selection in Bayesian bandits raises a fundamental exploration challenge: When an environment instance is sampled from a prior distribution, how can we design an adaptive strategy that explores multiple bandit learners and…
Cascading bandit (CB) is a popular model for web search and online advertising, where an agent aims to learn the $K$ most attractive items out of a ground set of size $L$ during the interaction with a user. However, the stationary CB model…
Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…
We study the problem of representation learning in stochastic contextual linear bandits. While the primary concern in this domain is usually to find realizable representations (i.e., those that allow predicting the reward function at any…
The dueling bandit problem, an essential variation of the traditional multi-armed bandit problem, has become significantly prominent recently due to its broad applications in online advertising, recommendation systems, information…
We study the regret of simulated annealing (SA) based approaches to solving discrete stochastic optimization problems. The main theoretical conclusion is that the regret of the simulated annealing algorithm, with either noisy or noiseless…
This paper considers the distributed online bandit optimization problem with nonconvex loss functions over a time-varying digraph. This problem can be viewed as a repeated game between a group of online players and an adversary. At each…