Related papers: Gaussian One-Armed Bandit and Optimization of Batc…
We consider a variant of the best arm identification task in stochastic multi-armed bandits. Motivated by risk-averse decision-making problems, our goal is to identify a set of $m$ arms with the highest $\tau$-quantile values within a fixed…
This paper studies the off-policy evaluation problem, where one aims to estimate the value of a target policy based on a sample of observations collected by another policy. We first consider the multi-armed bandit case, establish a minimax…
Modern systems, such as digital platforms and service systems, increasingly rely on contextual bandits for online decision-making; however, their deployment can inadvertently create unfair exposure among arms, undermining long-term platform…
We consider a contextual bandit problem with a combinatorial action set and time-varying base arm availability. At the beginning of each round, the agent observes the set of available base arms and their contexts and then selects an action…
In adaptive data analysis, the user makes a sequence of queries on the data, where at each step the choice of query may depend on the results in previous steps. The releases are often randomized in order to reduce overfitting for such…
We study distributed estimation of a Gaussian mean under communication constraints in a decision theoretical framework. Minimax rates of convergence, which characterize the tradeoff between the communication costs and statistical accuracy,…
We study the stochastic Multiplayer Multi-Armed Bandit (MMAB) problem, where multiple players select arms to maximize their cumulative rewards. Collisions occur when two or more players select the same arm, resulting in no reward, and are…
We study the distribution of regret in stochastic multi-armed bandits and episodic reinforcement learning through a unified framework. We formalize a distributional regret bound as a probabilistic guarantee that holds uniformly over all…
Minimax risk and regret focus on expectation, missing rare failures critical in safety-critical bandits and reinforcement learning. Minimax quantiles capture these tails. Three strands of prior work motivate this study: minimax-quantile…
Consider the problem of finding a population or a probability distribution amongst many with the largest mean when these means are unknown but population samples can be simulated or otherwise generated. Typically, by selecting largest…
We study the multi-armed bandit problem with arms which are Markov chains with rewards. In the finite-horizon setting, the celebrated Gittins indices do not apply, and the exact solution is intractable. We provide approximation algorithms…
The stochastic multi-armed bandit setting has been recently studied in the non-stationary regime, where the mean payoff of each action is a non-decreasing function of the number of rounds passed since it was last played. This model captures…
Stochastic multi-armed bandits form a class of online learning problems that have important applications in online recommendation systems, adaptive medical treatment, and many others. Even though potential attacks against these learning…
Best-arm identification (BAI) in a fixed-budget setting is a bandit problem where the learning agent maximizes the probability of identifying the optimal (best) arm after a fixed number of observations. Most works on this topic study…
We study the problem of best-arm identification with fixed confidence in stochastic linear bandits. The objective is to identify the best arm with a given level of certainty while minimizing the sampling budget. We devise a simple algorithm…
Attention to data-driven optimization approaches, including the well-known stochastic gradient descent method, has grown significantly over recent decades, but data-driven constraints have rarely been studied, because of the computational…
In the infinite-armed bandit problem, each arm's average reward is sampled from an unknown distribution, and each arm can be sampled further to obtain noisy estimates of the average reward of that arm. Prior work focuses on identifying the…
Myopic strategy is one of the most important strategies when studying bandit problems. In this paper, we consider the two-armed bandit problem proposed by Feldman. With general distributions and utility functions, we obtain a necessary and…
We consider the problem of \textit{best arm identification} with a \textit{fixed budget $T$}, in the $K$-armed stochastic bandit setting, with arms distribution defined on $[0,1]$. We prove that any bandit strategy, for at least one bandit…
We consider the one-armed bandit problem of Woodroofe [J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 74 (1979) 799--806], which involves sequential sampling from two populations: one whose characteristics are known, and one which depends on an unknown parameter…