Related papers: Risk-Averse Explore-Then-Commit Algorithms for Fin…

This paper proposes near-optimal algorithms for the pure-exploration linear bandit problem in the fixed confidence and fixed budget settings. Leveraging ideas from the theory of suprema of empirical processes, we provide an algorithm whose…

We consider a scenario where an agent has multiple available strategies to explore an unknown environment. For each new interaction with the environment, the agent must select which exploration strategy to use. We provide a new…

When multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms allocate pulls among competing arms, the resulting allocation can exhibit huge variation. This is particularly harmful in modern applications such as learning-enhanced platform operations and…

A sensing policy for the restless multi-armed bandit problem with stationary but unknown reward distributions is proposed. The work is presented in the context of cognitive radios in which the bandit problem arises when deciding which parts…

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…

In this paper, we consider the problem of multi-armed bandits with a large, possibly infinite number of correlated arms. We assume that the arms have Bernoulli distributed rewards, independent across time, where the probabilities of success…

Recommendation systems often face exploration-exploitation tradeoffs: the system can only learn about the desirability of new options by recommending them to some user. Such systems can thus be modeled as multi-armed bandit settings;…

We introduce the safe linear stochastic bandit framework---a generalization of linear stochastic bandits---where, in each stage, the learner is required to select an arm with an expected reward that is no less than a predetermined (safe)…

We study exploration in stochastic multi-armed bandits when we have access to a divisible resource that can be allocated in varying amounts to arm pulls. We focus in particular on the allocation of distributed computing resources, where we…

Best arm identification (or, pure exploration) in multi-armed bandits is a fundamental problem in machine learning. In this paper we study the distributed version of this problem where we have multiple agents, and they want to learn the…

We propose and study the known-compensation multi-arm bandit (KCMAB) problem, where a system controller offers a set of arms to many short-term players for $T$ steps. In each step, one short-term player arrives to the system. Upon arrival,…

The Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) framework highlights the tension between acquiring new knowledge (Exploration) and leveraging available knowledge (Exploitation). In the classical MAB problem, a decision maker must choose an arm at each time…

Experimentation with interference poses a significant challenge in contemporary online platforms. Prior research on experimentation with interference has concentrated on the final output of a policy. The cumulative performance, while…

In this paper, we consider several finite-horizon Bayesian multi-armed bandit problems with side constraints which are computationally intractable (NP-Hard) and for which no optimal (or near optimal) algorithms are known to exist with…

We consider a bandit problem where the buget is smaller than the number of arms, which may be infinite. In this regime, the usual objective in the literature is to minimize simple regret. To analyze broad classes of distributions with…

We propose a bandit algorithm that explores by randomizing its history of rewards. Specifically, it pulls the arm with the highest mean reward in a non-parametric bootstrap sample of its history with pseudo rewards. We design the pseudo…

We study a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, where at each time step, the player observes an independently sampled context that determines the arms' mean rewards. However, playing an arm blocks it (across all contexts) for a…

We propose $\tt RandUCB$, a bandit strategy that builds on theoretically derived confidence intervals similar to upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms, but akin to Thompson sampling (TS), it uses randomization to trade off exploration and…

We consider a stochastic bandit problem with infinitely many arms. In this setting, the learner has no chance of trying all the arms even once and has to dedicate its limited number of samples only to a certain number of arms. All previous…

Consider a bandit algorithm that recommends actions to self-interested users in a recommendation system. The users are free to choose other actions and need to be incentivized to follow the algorithm's recommendations. While the users…