Related papers: X-Armed Bandits: Optimizing Quantiles, CVaR and Ot…
Most contextual bandit algorithms minimize regret against the best fixed policy, a questionable benchmark for non-stationary environments that are ubiquitous in applications. In this work, we develop several efficient contextual bandit…
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…
We consider stochastic multi-armed bandits where the expected reward is a unimodal function over partially ordered arms. This important class of problems has been recently investigated in (Cope 2009, Yu 2011). The set of arms is either…
Black-box optimization is often encountered for decision-making in complex systems management, where the knowledge of system is limited. Under these circumstances, it is essential to balance the utilization of new information with…
Designing efficient general-purpose contextual bandit algorithms that work with large -- or even continuous -- action spaces would facilitate application to important scenarios such as information retrieval, recommendation systems, and…
We study a novel multi-armed bandit problem that models the challenge faced by a company wishing to explore new strategies to maximize revenue whilst simultaneously maintaining their revenue above a fixed baseline, uniformly over time.…
In this paper, we study the stochastic combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) framework that allows a general nonlinear reward function, whose expected value may not depend only on the means of the input random variables but possibly on…
We formulate the loop-free, binary superoptimization task as a stochastic search problem. The competing constraints of transformation correctness and performance improvement are encoded as terms in a cost function, and a Markov Chain Monte…
A promising approach to useful computational quantum advantage is to use variational quantum algorithms for optimisation problems. Crucial for the performance of these algorithms is to ensure that the algorithm converges with high…
Safe reinforcement learning aims to learn the optimal policy while satisfying safety constraints, which is essential in real-world applications. However, current algorithms still struggle for efficient policy updates with hard constraint…
This paper studies a new variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandits problem where auxiliary information about the arm rewards is available in the form of control variates. In many applications like queuing and wireless networks, the arm…
This paper studies mean-risk portfolio optimization models using the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) as a risk measure. We also employ a cardinality constraint for limiting the number of invested assets. Solving such a…
Balancing exploration and exploitation (EE) is a fundamental problem in contex-tual bandit. One powerful principle for EE trade-off isOptimism in Face of Uncer-tainty(OFU), in which the agent takes the action according to an upper…
Quantum Random Access Optimizer (QRAO) is a quantum-relaxation based optimization algorithm proposed by Fuller et al. that utilizes Quantum Random Access Code (QRAC) to encode multiple variables of binary optimization in a single qubit.…
We consider the problem of stochastic $K$-armed dueling bandit in the contextual setting, where at each round the learner is presented with a context set of $K$ items, each represented by a $d$-dimensional feature vector, and the goal of…
We propose stochastic rank-$1$ bandits, a class of online learning problems where at each step a learning agent chooses a pair of row and column arms, and receives the product of their values as a reward. The main challenge of the problem…
In this paper, we contribute to the Extreme Bandit problem, a variant of Multi-Armed Bandits in which the learner seeks to collect the largest possible reward. We first study the concentration of the maximum of i.i.d random variables under…
We address a generalization of the bandit with knapsacks problem, where a learner aims to maximize rewards while satisfying an arbitrary set of long-term constraints. Our goal is to design best-of-both-worlds algorithms that perform…
Conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) and value-at-risk (VaR) are popular tail-risk measures in finance and insurance industries as well as in highly reliable, safety-critical uncertain environments where often the underlying probability…
We describe a novel algorithm for noisy global optimisation and continuum-armed bandits, with good convergence properties over any continuous reward function having finitely many polynomial maxima. Over such functions, our algorithm…