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Many stochastic optimization algorithms work by estimating the gradient of the cost function on the fly by sampling datapoints uniformly at random from a training set. However, the estimator might have a large variance, which inadvertently…
Mode estimation is a classical problem in statistics with a wide range of applications in machine learning. Despite this, there is little understanding in its robustness properties under possibly adversarial data contamination. In this…
In algorithm optimization in reinforcement learning, how to deal with the exploration-exploitation dilemma is particularly important. Multi-armed bandit problem can optimize the proposed solutions by changing the reward distribution to…
Identifying the best arm of a multi-armed bandit is a central problem in bandit optimization. We study a quantum computational version of this problem with coherent oracle access to states encoding the reward probabilities of each arm as…
The piecewise-stationary bandit problem is an important variant of the multi-armed bandit problem that further considers abrupt changes in the reward distributions. The main theme of the problem is the trade-off between exploration for…
In the contextual linear bandit setting, algorithms built on the optimism principle fail to exploit the structure of the problem and have been shown to be asymptotically suboptimal. In this paper, we follow recent approaches of deriving…
In this paper, we propose a novel perturbation-based exploration method in bandit algorithms with bounded or unbounded rewards, called residual bootstrap exploration (\texttt{ReBoot}). The \texttt{ReBoot} enforces exploration by injecting…
This paper studies the fixed-confidence best arm identification (BAI) problem in the bandit framework in the canonical single-parameter exponential models. For this problem, many policies have been proposed, but most of them require solving…
We introduce the model selection problem in pure exploration linear bandits, where the learner needs to adapt to the instance-dependent complexity measure of the smallest hypothesis class containing the true model. We design algorithms in…
We propose an algorithm for non-stationary kernel bandits that does not require prior knowledge of the degree of non-stationarity. The algorithm follows randomized strategies obtained by solving optimization problems that balance…
The knowledge gradient (KG) algorithm is a popular and effective algorithm for the best arm identification (BAI) problem. Due to the complex calculation of KG, theoretical analysis of this algorithm is difficult, and existing results are…
We formulate the problem of sampling and recovering clustered graph signal as a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem. This formulation lends naturally to learning sampling strategies using the well-known gradient MAB algorithm. In particular,…
We establish a link between a class of discrete choice models and the theory of online learning and multi-armed bandits. Our contributions are: (i) sublinear regret bounds for a broad algorithmic family, encompassing Exp3 as a special case;…
While in general trading off exploration and exploitation in reinforcement learning is hard, under some formulations relatively simple solutions exist. In this paper, we first derive upper bounds for the utility of selecting different…
The paper proposes a novel upper confidence bound (UCB) procedure for identifying the arm with the largest mean in a multi-armed bandit game in the fixed confidence setting using a small number of total samples. The procedure cannot be…
In the infinite-armed bandit problem, each arm's average reward is sampled from an unknown distribution, and each arm can be sampled further to obtain noisy estimates of the average reward of that arm. Prior work focuses on identifying the…
In this paper, we consider a bandit problem in which there are a number of groups each consisting of infinitely many arms. Whenever a new arm is requested from a given group, its mean reward is drawn from an unknown reservoir distribution…
This paper presents an efficient algorithm to solve the sleeping bandit with multiple plays problem in the context of an online recommendation system. The problem involves bounded, adversarial loss and unknown i.i.d. distributions for arm…
We study the best-arm identification problem in linear bandit, where the rewards of the arms depend linearly on an unknown parameter $\theta^*$ and the objective is to return the arm with the largest reward. We characterize the complexity…
We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with i.i.d. rewards where the expected reward function is multimodal with at most m modes. We propose the first known computationally tractable algorithm for computing the solution to the…