Related papers: Gradient Ascent for Active Exploration in Bandit P…
The Random Mutation Hill-Climbing algorithm is a direct search technique mostly used in discrete domains. It repeats the process of randomly selecting a neighbour of a best-so-far solution and accepts the neighbour if it is better than or…
Bandit based optimisation has a remarkable advantage over gradient based approaches due to their global perspective, which eliminates the danger of getting stuck at local optima. However, for continuous optimisation problems or problems…
It has been shown (Amuru et al. 2015) that online learning algorithms can be effectively used to select optimal physical layer parameters for jamming against digital modulation schemes without a priori knowledge of the victim's transmission…
This paper studies the problem of adaptively sampling from K distributions (arms) in order to identify the largest gap between any two adjacent means. We call this the MaxGap-bandit problem. This problem arises naturally in approximate…
We study sequential decision-making with known rewards and unknown constraints, motivated by situations where the constraints represent expensive-to-evaluate human preferences, such as safe and comfortable driving behavior. We formalize the…
We consider the question introduced by \cite{Mason2020} of identifying all the $\varepsilon$-optimal arms in a finite stochastic multi-armed bandit with Gaussian rewards. We give two lower bounds on the sample complexity of any algorithm…
Satisficing is a relaxation of maximizing and allows for less risky decision making in the face of uncertainty. We propose two sets of satisficing objectives for the multi-armed bandit problem, where the objective is to achieve reward-based…
Autoregressive processes naturally arise in a large variety of real-world scenarios, including stock markets, sales forecasting, weather prediction, advertising, and pricing. When facing a sequential decision-making problem in such a…
We study a grouped bandit setting where each arm comprises multiple independent sub-arms referred to as attributes. Each attribute of each arm has an independent stochastic reward. We impose the constraint that for an arm to be deemed…
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 Knowledge Gradient (KG) policy was originally proposed for online ranking and selection problems but has recently been adapted for use in online decision making in general and multi-armed bandit problems (MABs) in particular. We study…
We adopt an optimal-control framework for addressing the undiscounted infinite-horizon discrete-time restless $N$-armed bandit problem. Unlike most studies that rely on constructing policies based on the relaxed single-armed Markov Decision…
Combinatorial bandits extend the classical bandit framework to settings where the learner selects multiple arms in each round, motivated by applications such as online recommendation and assortment optimization. While extensions of upper…
Motivated by problems of learning to rank long item sequences, we introduce a variant of the cascading bandit model that considers flexible length sequences with varying rewards and losses. We formulate two generative models for this…
Statistical inference with bandit data presents fundamental challenges due to adaptive sampling, which violates the independence assumptions underlying classical asymptotic theory. Recent work has identified stability as a sufficient…
Pure exploration in multi-armed bandits has emerged as an important framework for modeling decision-making and search under uncertainty. In modern applications, however, one is often faced with a tremendously large number of options. Even…
In this report, we survey Bayesian Optimization methods focussed on the Multi-Armed Bandit Problem. We take the help of the paper "Portfolio Allocation for Bayesian Optimization". We report a small literature survey on the acquisition…
We study stochastic linear optimization problem with bandit feedback. The set of arms take values in an $N$-dimensional space and belong to a bounded polyhedron described by finitely many linear inequalities. We provide a lower bound for…
We consider a bandit problem which involves sequential sampling from two populations (arms). Each arm produces a noisy reward realization which depends on an observable random covariate. The goal is to maximize cumulative expected reward.…
Sampling from distributions to find the one with the largest mean arises in a broad range of applications, and it can be mathematically modeled as a multi-armed bandit problem in which each distribution is associated with an arm. This paper…