Related papers: Cost-aware Cascading Bandits
Stochastic multi-armed bandits (MABs) provide a fundamental reinforcement learning model to study sequential decision making in uncertain environments. The upper confidence bounds (UCB) algorithm gave birth to the renaissance of bandit…
An automatic machine learning (AutoML) task is to select the best algorithm and its hyper-parameters simultaneously. Previously, the hyper-parameters of all algorithms are joint as a single search space, which is not only huge but also…
Cascading bandits is a natural and popular model that frames the task of learning to rank from Bernoulli click feedback in a bandit setting. For the case of unstructured rewards, we prove matching upper and lower bounds for the…
Conservative Contextual Bandits (CCBs) address safety in sequential decision making by requiring that an agent's policy, along with minimizing regret, also satisfies a safety constraint: the performance is not worse than a baseline policy…
The design of personalized incentives or recommendations to improve user engagement is gaining prominence as digital platform providers continually emerge. We propose a multi-armed bandit framework for matching incentives to users, whose…
We introduce a new stochastic multi-armed bandit setting where arms are grouped inside ``ordered'' categories. The motivating example comes from e-commerce, where a customer typically has a greater appetence for items of a specific…
Continuously learning and leveraging the knowledge accumulated from prior tasks in order to improve future performance is a long standing machine learning problem. In this paper, we study the problem in the multi-armed bandit framework with…
We study stage-wise conservative linear stochastic bandits: an instance of bandit optimization, which accounts for (unknown) safety constraints that appear in applications such as online advertising and medical trials. At each stage, the…
Originally motivated by default risk management applications, this paper investigates a novel problem, referred to as the profitable bandit problem here. At each step, an agent chooses a subset of the K possible actions. For each action…
In decision-making problems such as the multi-armed bandit, an agent learns sequentially by optimizing a certain feedback. While the mean reward criterion has been extensively studied, other measures that reflect an aversion to adverse…
The combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) is a fundamental sequential decision-making framework, extensively studied over the past decade. However, existing work primarily focuses on the online setting, overlooking the substantial costs…
We focus on the problem of best-arm identification in a stochastic multi-arm bandit with temporally decreasing variances for the arms' rewards. We model arm rewards as Gaussian random variables with fixed means and variances that decrease…
Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithms are a widely-used class of sequential algorithms for the $K$-armed bandit problem. Despite extensive research over the past decades aimed at understanding their asymptotic and (near) minimax…
In this paper, we study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with graph feedback. Motivated by the clinical trials and recommendation problem, we assume that two arms are connected if and only if they are similar (i.e., their means are…
Online learning to rank (OLTR) studies how to recommend a short ranked list of items from a large pool and improves future rankings based on user clicks. This setting is commonly modeled as cascading bandits, where the objective is to…
In many fields such as digital marketing, healthcare, finance, and robotics, it is common to have a well-tested and reliable baseline policy running in production (e.g., a recommender system). Nonetheless, the baseline policy is often…
We study a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, where at each time step, the player observes an independently sampled context that determines the arms' mean rewards. However, playing an arm blocks it (across all contexts) for a…
We study the nonstationary stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem in which the distribution of rewards associated with each arm are assumed to be time-varying and the total variation in the expected rewards is subject to a variation…
Motivated by wireless networks where interference or channel state estimates provide partial insight into throughput, we study a variant of the classical stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in which the learner has limited access to…
Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) is arguably the most commonly used method for linear multi-arm bandit problems. While conceptually and computationally simple, this method highly relies on the confidence bounds, failing to strike the optimal…