Related papers: New Insights into Bootstrapping for Bandits
Thompson sampling is one of the earliest randomized algorithms for multi-armed bandits (MAB). In this paper, we extend the Thompson sampling to Budgeted MAB, where there is random cost for pulling an arm and the total cost is constrained by…
We consider the problem of contextual bandits where actions are subsets of a ground set and mean rewards are modeled by an unknown monotone submodular function that belongs to a class $\mathcal{F}$. We allow time-varying matroid constraints…
Thompson sampling, a Bayesian method for balancing exploration and exploitation in bandit problems, has theoretical guarantees and exhibits strong empirical performance in many domains. Traditional Thompson sampling, however, assumes…
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…
We revisit the classic regret-minimization problem in the stochastic multi-armed bandit setting when the arm-distributions are allowed to be heavy-tailed. Regret minimization has been well studied in simpler settings of either bounded…
Bayesian bandit algorithms with approximate Bayesian inference have been widely used in real-world applications. However, there is a large discrepancy between the superior practical performance of these approaches and their theoretical…
We address the problem of regret minimization in logistic contextual bandits, where a learner decides among sequential actions or arms given their respective contexts to maximize binary rewards. Using a fast inference procedure with…
Contextual bandits are a central framework for sequential decision-making, with applications ranging from recommendation systems to clinical trials. While nonparametric methods can flexibly model complex reward structures, they suffer from…
The literature on bandit learning and regret analysis has focused on contexts where the goal is to converge on an optimal action in a manner that limits exploration costs. One shortcoming imposed by this orientation is that it does not…
The adversarial Bandit with Knapsack problem is a multi-armed bandits problem with budget constraints and adversarial rewards and costs. In each round, a learner selects an action to take and observes the reward and cost of the selected…
We propose a new bootstrap-based online algorithm for stochastic linear bandit problems. The key idea is to adopt residual bootstrap exploration, in which the agent estimates the next step reward by re-sampling the residuals of mean reward…
Reward-biased maximum likelihood estimation (RBMLE) is a classic principle in the adaptive control literature for tackling explore-exploit trade-offs. This paper studies the stochastic contextual bandit problem with general bounded reward…
We consider Bandits with Knapsacks (henceforth, BwK), a general model for multi-armed bandits under supply/budget constraints. In particular, a bandit algorithm needs to solve a well-known knapsack problem: find an optimal packing of items…
This paper studies bandit convex optimization in non-stationary environments with two-point feedback, using dynamic regret as the performance measure. We propose an algorithm based on bandit mirror descent that extends naturally to…
In this paper we consider Thompson Sampling (TS) for combinatorial semi-bandits. We demonstrate that, perhaps surprisingly, TS is sub-optimal for this problem in the sense that its regret scales exponentially in the ambient dimension, and…
In recommender system or crowdsourcing applications of online learning, a human's preferences or abilities are often a function of the algorithm's recent actions. Motivated by this, a significant line of work has formalized settings where…
We study the stochastic contextual bandit problem, where the reward is generated from an unknown function with additive noise. No assumption is made about the reward function other than boundedness. We propose a new algorithm, NeuralUCB,…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a classical learning task that exemplifies the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. However, standard formulations do not take into account {\em risk}. In online decision making systems, risk is a…
This paper introduces and addresses a wide class of stochastic bandit problems where the function mapping the arm to the corresponding reward exhibits some known structural properties. Most existing structures (e.g. linear, Lipschitz,…
We study reward maximisation in a wide class of structured stochastic multi-armed bandit problems, where the mean rewards of arms satisfy some given structural constraints, e.g. linear, unimodal, sparse, etc. Our aim is to develop methods…