Related papers: Exponential two-armed bandit problem
We study the multi-armed bandit problem with arms which are Markov chains with rewards. In the finite-horizon setting, the celebrated Gittins indices do not apply, and the exact solution is intractable. We provide approximation algorithms…
We unify two prominent lines of work on multi-armed bandits: bandits with knapsacks (BwK) and combinatorial semi-bandits. The former concerns limited "resources" consumed by the algorithm, e.g., limited supply in dynamic pricing. The latter…
In a fixed-confidence pure exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits, an algorithm iteratively samples arms and should stop as early as possible and return the correct answer to a query about the arms distributions. We are…
Bayesian optimization is a framework for global search via maximum a posteriori updates rather than simulated annealing, and has gained prominence for decision-making under uncertainty. In this work, we cast Bayesian optimization as a…
In this paper, we introduce the notion of replicable policies in the context of stochastic bandits, one of the canonical problems in interactive learning. A policy in the bandit environment is called replicable if it pulls, with high…
Over the past few years, the multi-armed bandit model has become increasingly popular in the machine learning community, partly because of applications including online content optimization. This paper reviews two different sequential…
We consider Bayesian optimization in settings where observations can be adversarially biased, for example by an uncontrolled hidden confounder. Our first contribution is a reduction of the confounded setting to the dueling bandit model.…
The Greedy algorithm is the simplest heuristic in sequential decision problem that carelessly takes the locally optimal choice at each round, disregarding any advantages of exploring and/or information gathering. Theoretically, it is known…
The challenge of identifying the best feasible arm within a fixed budget has attracted considerable interest in recent years. However, a notable gap remains in the literature: the exact exponential rate at which the error probability…
In this paper, we study the multi-armed bandit problem in the batched setting where the employed policy must split data into a small number of batches. While the minimax regret for the two-armed stochastic bandits has been completely…
We consider parametric exponential families of dimension $K$ on the real line. We study a variant of \textit{boundary crossing probabilities} coming from the multi-armed bandit literature, in the case when the real-valued distributions form…
We prove that single-parameter natural exponential families with subexponential tails are self-concordant with polynomial-sized parameters. For subgaussian natural exponential families we establish an exact characterization of the growth…
This paper is about index policies for minimizing (frequentist) regret in a stochastic multi-armed bandit model, inspired by a Bayesian view on the problem. Our main contribution is to prove that the Bayes-UCB algorithm, which relies on…
We introduce a new stochastic multi-armed bandit setting where arms are grouped inside ``ordered'' categories. The motivating example comes from e-commerce, where a customer typically has a greater appetence for items of a specific…
We consider the upper confidence bound strategy for Gaussian multi-armed bandits with known control horizon sizes $N$ and build its limiting description with a system of stochastic differential equations and ordinary differential equations.…
This paper is devoted to the study of the max K-armed bandit problem, which consists in sequentially allocating resources in order to detect extreme values. Our contribution is twofold. We first significantly refine the analysis of the…
This paper studies a multi-armed bandit problem where the decision-maker is loss averse, in particular she is risk averse in the domain of gains and risk loving in the domain of losses. The focus is on large horizons. Consequences of loss…
We study a finite time horizon Markov decision process (MDP) consisting of several groups of multi-action finite-state restless bandit processes, which are identical within each group. The bandit processes into different groups can be…
This paper considers a multi-armed bandit game where the number of arms is much larger than the maximum budget and is effectively infinite. We characterize necessary and sufficient conditions on the total budget for an algorithm to return…
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…