Related papers: Empirical Bayes Regret Minimization
We study the tail behavior of regret in stochastic multi-armed bandits for algorithms that are asymptotically optimal in expectation. While minimizing expected regret is the classical objective, recent work shows that even such algorithms…
We propose ${\tt AdaTS}$, a Thompson sampling algorithm that adapts sequentially to bandit tasks that it interacts with. The key idea in ${\tt AdaTS}$ is to adapt to an unknown task prior distribution by maintaining a distribution over its…
Using bandit algorithms to conduct adaptive randomised experiments can minimise regret, but it poses major challenges for statistical inference (e.g., biased estimators, inflated type-I error and reduced power). Recent attempts to address…
We study adaptive regret bounds in terms of the variation of the losses (the so-called path-length bounds) for both multi-armed bandit and more generally linear bandit. We first show that the seemingly suboptimal path-length bound of (Wei…
We study the problem of worst case regret in piecewise stationary multi armed bandits. While the minimax theory for stationary bandits is well established, understanding analogous limits in time-varying settings is challenging. Existing…
This paper investigates stochastic and adversarial combinatorial multi-armed bandit problems. In the stochastic setting under semi-bandit feedback, we derive a problem-specific regret lower bound, and discuss its scaling with the dimension…
In this work, we investigate black-box optimization from the perspective of frequentist kernel methods. We propose a novel batch optimization algorithm, which jointly maximizes the acquisition function and select points from a whole batch…
We study a regret minimization problem with the existence of multiple best/near-optimal arms in the multi-armed bandit setting. We consider the case when the number of arms/actions is comparable or much larger than the time horizon, and…
We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting and study the problem of constrained regret minimization over a given time horizon. Each arm is associated with an unknown, possibly multi-dimensional distribution, and the merit of an arm…
Bayesian methods suffer from the problem of how to specify prior beliefs. One interesting idea is to consider worst-case priors. This requires solving a stochastic zero-sum game. In this paper, we extend well-known results from bandit…
Restless bandit problems are instances of non-stationary multi-armed bandits. These problems have been studied well from the optimization perspective, where the goal is to efficiently find a near-optimal policy when system parameters are…
Optimal regret bounds for Multi-Armed Bandit problems are now well documented. They can be classified into two categories based on the growth rate with respect to the time horizon $T$: (i) small, distribution-dependent, bounds of order of…
Online model selection in Bayesian bandits raises a fundamental exploration challenge: When an environment instance is sampled from a prior distribution, how can we design an adaptive strategy that explores multiple bandit learners and…
Dueling bandits are widely used to model preferential feedback prevalent in many applications such as recommendation systems and ranking. In this paper, we study the Borda regret minimization problem for dueling bandits, which aims to…
Algorithms for hyperparameter optimization abound, all of which work well under different and often unverifiable assumptions. Motivated by the general challenge of sequentially choosing which algorithm to use, we study the more specific…
We introduce a novel online learning framework that unifies and generalizes pre-established models, such as delayed and corrupted feedback, to encompass adversarial environments where action feedback evolves over time. In this setting, the…
Algorithm selection is typically based on models of algorithm performance, learned during a separate offline training sequence, which can be prohibitively expensive. In recent work, we adopted an online approach, in which a performance…
We study how the regret guarantees of nonstochastic multi-armed bandits can be improved, if the effective range of the losses in each round is small (e.g. the maximal difference between two losses in a given round). Despite a recent…
We consider the problem of minimizing the regret in stochastic multi-armed bandit, when the measure of goodness of an arm is not the mean return, but some general function of the mean and the variance.We characterize the conditions under…
Most bandit algorithms assume that the reward variances or their upper bounds are known, and that they are the same for all arms. This naturally leads to suboptimal performance and higher regret due to variance overestimation. On the other…