Related papers: Making the Cut: A Bandit-based Approach to Tiered …
Pure exploration is one of the fundamental problems in multi-armed bandits (MAB). However, existing works mostly focus on specific pure exploration tasks, without a holistic view of the general pure exploration problem. This work fills this…
Cutting plane methods play a significant role in modern solvers for tackling mixed-integer programming (MIP) problems. Proper selection of cuts would remove infeasible solutions in the early stage, thus largely reducing the computational…
Tiering is an essential technique for building large-scale information retrieval systems. While the selection of documents for high priority tiers critically impacts the efficiency of tiering, past work focuses on optimizing it with respect…
We consider the problem of Combinatorial Pure Exploration (CPE), which deals with finding a combinatorial set or arms with a high reward, when the rewards of individual arms are unknown in advance and must be estimated using arm pulls.…
In this work, we propose a multi-armed bandit-based framework for identifying a compact set of informative data instances (i.e., the prototypes) from a source dataset $S$ that best represents a given target set $T$. Prototypical examples of…
We consider a constrained, pure exploration, stochastic multi-armed bandit formulation under a fixed budget. Each arm is associated with an unknown, possibly multi-dimensional distribution and is described by multiple attributes that are a…
Most recommender systems recommend a list of items. The user examines the list, from the first item to the last, and often chooses the first attractive item and does not examine the rest. This type of user behavior can be modeled by the…
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 study the Combinatorial Pure Exploration problem with Continuous and Separable reward functions (CPE-CS) in the stochastic multi-armed bandit setting. In a CPE-CS instance, we are given several stochastic arms with unknown distributions,…
Conversational recommender systems have emerged as a potent solution for efficiently eliciting user preferences. These systems interactively present queries associated with "key terms" to users and leverage user feedback to estimate user…
We consider the combinatorial bandits problem with semi-bandit feedback under finite sampling budget constraints, in which the learner can carry out its action only for a limited number of times specified by an overall budget. The action is…
For sponsored search auctions, we consider contextual multi-armed bandit problem in the presence of strategic agents. In this setting, at each round, an advertising platform (center) runs an auction to select the best-suited ads relevant to…
We consider the multi armed bandit problem in non-stationary environments. Based on the Bayesian method, we propose a variant of Thompson Sampling which can be used in both rested and restless bandit scenarios. Applying discounting to the…
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…
Combinatorial bandits with semi-bandit feedback generalize multi-armed bandits, where the agent chooses sets of arms and observes a noisy reward for each arm contained in the chosen set. The action set satisfies a given structure such as…
Learning good interventions in a causal graph can be modelled as a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with side-information. First, we study this problem when interventions are more expensive than observations and a budget is specified.…
We study the problem of learning 'good' interventions in a stochastic environment modeled by its underlying causal graph. Good interventions refer to interventions that maximize rewards. Specifically, we consider the setting of a…
Sequential decision-making algorithms such as multi-armed bandits can find optimal personalized decisions, but are notoriously sample-hungry. In personalized medicine, for example, training a bandit from scratch for every patient is…
With the availability of big medical image data, the selection of an adequate training set is becoming more important to address the heterogeneity of different datasets. Simply including all the data does not only incur high processing…
Screening tasks that aim to identify a small subset of top alternatives from a large pool are common in business decision-making processes. These tasks often require substantial human effort to evaluate each alternative's performance,…