Related papers: Gittins' theorem under uncertainty
We consider the problem of best arm identification in the multi-armed bandit model, under fixed confidence. Given a confidence input $\delta$, the goal is to identify the arm with the highest mean reward with a probability of at least 1 --…
We consider the infinite-horizon, average-reward restless bandit problem in discrete time. We propose a new class of policies that are designed to drive a progressively larger subset of arms toward the optimal distribution. We show that our…
I analyse the frequentist regret of the famous Gittins index strategy for multi-armed bandits with Gaussian noise and a finite horizon. Remarkably it turns out that this approach leads to finite-time regret guarantees comparable to those…
Exploration policies in Bayesian bandits maximize the average reward over problem instances drawn from some distribution $\mathcal{P}$. In this work, we learn such policies for an unknown distribution $\mathcal{P}$ using samples from…
Algorithms for hyperparameter optimization abound, all of which work well under different and often unverifiable assumptions. Motivated by the general challenge of sequentially choosing which algorithm to use, we study the more specific…
Restless and collapsing bandits are often used to model budget-constrained resource allocation in settings where arms have action-dependent transition probabilities, such as the allocation of health interventions among patients. However,…
In the multiarmed bandit problem a gambler chooses an arm of a slot machine to pull considering a tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. We study the stochastic bandit problem where each arm has a reward distribution supported in a…
Human dynamics is known to be inhomogeneous and bursty but the detailed understanding of the role of human factors in bursty dynamics is still lacking. In order to investigate their role we devise an agent-based model, where an agent in an…
We consider finite-horizon restless bandits with multiple pulls per period, which play an important role in recommender systems, active learning, revenue management, and many other areas. While an optimal policy can be computed, in…
We consider a bandit problem where at any time, the decision maker can add new arms to her consideration set. A new arm is queried at a cost from an "arm-reservoir" containing finitely many "arm-types," each characterized by a distinct mean…
A more general formulation of the linear bandit problem is considered to allow for dependencies over time. Specifically, it is assumed that there exists an unknown $\mathbb{R}^d$-valued stationary $\varphi$-mixing sequence of parameters…
Possibility theory is proposed as an uncertainty representation framework for distributed learning in multi-agent systems and robot swarms. In particular, we investigate its application to the best-of-n problem where the aim is for a…
Gittins indices provide an optimal solution to the classical multi-armed bandit problem. An obstacle to their use has been the common perception that their computation is very difficult. This paper demonstrates an accessible general…
We study batched bandit experiments and consider the problem of inference conditional on the realized stopping time, assignment probabilities, and target parameter, where all of these may be chosen adaptively using information up to the…
In the budgeted learning problem, we are allowed to experiment on a set of alternatives (given a fixed experimentation budget) with the goal of picking a single alternative with the largest possible expected payoff. Approximation algorithms…
The efficacy of robust optimization spans a variety of settings with uncertainties bounded in predetermined sets. In many applications, uncertainties are affected by decisions and cannot be modeled with current frameworks. This paper takes…
One of two independent stochastic processes (arms) are to be selected at each of n stages. The selection is sequential and depends on past observations as well as the prior information. Observations from arm i are independent given a…
We introduce the "inverse bandit" problem of estimating the rewards of a multi-armed bandit instance from observing the learning process of a low-regret demonstrator. Existing approaches to the related problem of inverse reinforcement…
Online decision-making can be formulated as the popular stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where a learner makes decisions (or takes actions) to maximize cumulative rewards collected from an unknown environment. This paper proposes to…
We consider a version of the continuous-time multi-armed bandit problem where decision opportunities arrive at Poisson arrival times, and study its Gittins index policy. When driven by spectrally one-sided L\'evy processes, the Gittins…