Related papers: Multi-Armed Bandit Problem and Batch UCB Rule
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…
We propose a novel variant of the UCB algorithm (referred to as Efficient-UCB-Variance (EUCBV)) for minimizing cumulative regret in the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) setting. EUCBV incorporates the arm elimination strategy proposed in…
The upper confidence bound (UCB) policy is recognized as an order-optimal solution for the classical total-reward bandit problem. While similar UCB-based approaches have been applied to the max bandit problem, which aims to maximize the…
In this paper we propose the Augmented-UCB (AugUCB) algorithm for a fixed-budget version of the thresholding bandit problem (TBP), where the objective is to identify a set of arms whose quality is above a threshold. A key feature of AugUCB…
The stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is one of the most fundamental models in sequential decision-making, with the core challenge being the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Although algorithms such as Upper…
In this paper, we study the problem of estimating uniformly well the mean values of several distributions given a finite budget of samples. If the variance of the distributions were known, one could design an optimal sampling strategy by…
Multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a class of online learning problems where a learning agent aims to maximize its expected cumulative reward while repeatedly selecting to pull arms with unknown reward distributions. We consider a scenario where…
In this paper, we discuss the asymptotic behavior of the Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithm in the context of multiarmed bandit problems and discuss its implication in downstream inferential tasks. While inferential tasks become…
Sequential decision-making under uncertainty often involves multiple agents learning which actions (arms) yield the highest rewards through repeated interaction with a stochastic environment. This setting is commonly modeled by cooperative…
Lai and Robbins (1985) and Lai (1987) provided efficient parametric solutions to the multi-armed bandit problem, showing that arm allocation via upper confidence bounds (UCB) achieves minimum regret. These bounds are constructed from the…
Multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a widely adopted framework for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. Traditional bandit algorithms rely solely on online data, which tends to be scarce as it must be gathered during the online phase when…
We provide a simple method to combine stochastic bandit algorithms. Our approach is based on a "meta-UCB" procedure that treats each of $N$ individual bandit algorithms as arms in a higher-level $N$-armed bandit problem that we solve with a…
We present a new type of acquisition functions for online decision making in multi-armed and contextual bandit problems with extreme payoffs. Specifically, we model the payoff function as a Gaussian process and formulate a novel type of…
We present ML-UCB, a generalized upper confidence bound algorithm that integrates arbitrary machine learning models into multi-armed bandit frameworks. A fundamental challenge in deploying sophisticated ML models for sequential…
The multi-armed bandit(MAB) problem is a simple yet powerful framework that has been extensively studied in the context of decision-making under uncertainty. In many real-world applications, such as robotic applications, selecting an arm…
Bandit algorithms have various application in safety-critical systems, where it is important to respect the system constraints that rely on the bandit's unknown parameters at every round. In this paper, we formulate a linear stochastic…
We consider a resource-aware variant of the classical multi-armed bandit problem: In each round, the learner selects an arm and determines a resource limit. It then observes a corresponding (random) reward, provided the (random) amount of…
We investigate a Bayesian $k$-armed bandit problem in the \emph{many-armed} regime, where $k \geq \sqrt{T}$ and $T$ represents the time horizon. Initially, and aligned with recent literature on many-armed bandit problems, we observe that…
We present a provably optimal differentially private algorithm for the stochastic multi-arm bandit problem, as opposed to the private analogue of the UCB-algorithm [Mishra and Thakurta, 2015; Tossou and Dimitrakakis, 2016] which doesn't…
Contextual multi-armed bandits (CMAB) have been widely used for learning to filter and prioritize information according to a user's interest. In this work, we analyze top-K ranking under the CMAB framework where the top-K arms are chosen…