Related papers: Information Directed Sampling and Bandits with Het…
This note introduce three Bayesian style Multi-armed bandit algorithms: Information-directed sampling, Thompson Sampling and Generalized Thompson Sampling. The goal is to give an intuitive explanation for these three algorithms and their…
We study the stochastic linear bandits with parameter noise model, in which the reward of action $a$ is $a^\top \theta$ where $\theta$ is sampled i.i.d. We show a regret upper bound of $\widetilde{O} (\sqrt{d T \log (K/\delta)…
Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) method is arguably the most celebrated one used in online decision making with partial information feedback. Existing techniques for constructing confidence bounds are typically built upon various concentration…
In this paper we consider the problem of online stochastic optimization of a locally smooth function under bandit feedback. We introduce the high-confidence tree (HCT) algorithm, a novel any-time $\mathcal{X}$-armed bandit algorithm, and…
This paper addresses the problem of learning to sparsify stochastic linear bandits, where a decision-maker sequentially selects actions from a high-dimensional space subject to a sparsity constraint on the number of nonzero elements in the…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a foundational framework in sequential decision-making under uncertainty, extensively studied for its applications in areas such as clinical trials, online advertising, and resource allocation.…
In this paper we propose a general methodology to derive regret bounds for randomized multi-armed bandit algorithms. It consists in checking a set of sufficient conditions on the sampling probability of each arm and on the family of…
Recent works in bandit problems adopted lasso convergence theory in the sequential decision-making setting. Even with fully observed contexts, there are technical challenges that hinder the application of existing lasso convergence theory:…
In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective…
Mean rewards of actions are often correlated. The form of these correlations may be complex and unknown a priori, such as the preferences of a user for recommended products and their categories. To maximize statistical efficiency, it is…
We study nonparametric contextual bandits under batch constraints, where the expected reward for each action is modeled as a smooth function of covariates, and the policy updates are made at the end of each batch of observations. We…
The multi-armed bandit formalism has been extensively studied under various attack models, in which an adversary can modify the reward revealed to the player. Previous studies focused on scenarios where the attack value either is bounded at…
The most prominent feedback models for the best expert problem are the full information and bandit models. In this work we consider a simple feedback model that generalizes both, where on every round, in addition to a bandit feedback, the…
We study regret minimization in a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting and establish a fundamental trade-off between the regret suffered under an algorithm, and its statistical robustness. Considering broad classes of underlying arms'…
We study online learning with bandit feedback across multiple tasks, with the goal of improving average performance across tasks if they are similar according to some natural task-similarity measure. As the first to target the adversarial…
We consider the problem of optimizing an unknown (typically non-convex) function with a bounded norm in some Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS), based on noisy bandit feedback. We consider a novel variant of this problem in which the…
We consider the stochastic linear contextual bandit problem with high-dimensional features. We analyze the Thompson sampling algorithm using special classes of sparsity-inducing priors (e.g., spike-and-slab) to model the unknown parameter…
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…
A challenging aspect of the bandit problem is that a stochastic reward is observed only for the chosen arm and the rewards of other arms remain missing. The dependence of the arm choice on the past context and reward pairs compounds the…
In this paper, we consider stochastic multi-armed bandits (MABs) with heavy-tailed rewards, whose $p$-th moment is bounded by a constant $\nu_{p}$ for $1<p\leq2$. First, we propose a novel robust estimator which does not require $\nu_{p}$…