Related papers: Smoothness-Adaptive Contextual Bandits
Contextual bandits are canonical models for sequential decision-making under uncertainty in environments with time-varying components. In this setting, the expected reward of each bandit arm consists of the inner product of an unknown…
We study bandit best-arm identification with arbitrary and potentially adversarial rewards. A simple random uniform learner obtains the optimal rate of error in the adversarial scenario. However, this type of strategy is suboptimal when the…
In performative prediction, the deployment of a predictive model triggers a shift in the data distribution. As these shifts are typically unknown ahead of time, the learner needs to deploy a model to get feedback about the distribution it…
We study bandit model selection in stochastic environments. Our approach relies on a meta-algorithm that selects between candidate base algorithms. We develop a meta-algorithm-base algorithm abstraction that can work with general classes of…
Although many algorithms for the multi-armed bandit problem are well-understood theoretically, empirical confirmation of their effectiveness is generally scarce. This paper presents a thorough empirical study of the most popular multi-armed…
This paper puts forward the concept that learning to take safe actions in unknown environments, even with probability one guarantees, can be achieved without the need for an unbounded number of exploratory trials. This is indeed possible,…
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…
We study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with non-equivalent multiple plays where, at each step, an agent chooses not only a set of arms, but also their order, which influences reward distribution. In several problem formulations…
We study nonparametric contextual bandits where Lipschitz mean reward functions may change over time. We first establish the minimax dynamic regret rate in this less understood setting in terms of number of changes $L$ and total-variation…
Many sequential decision-making problems in communication networks can be modeled as contextual bandit problems, which are natural extensions of the well-known multi-armed bandit problem. In contextual bandit problems, at each time, an…
Model selection in supervised learning provides costless guarantees as if the model that best balances bias and variance was known a priori. We study the feasibility of similar guarantees for cumulative regret minimization in the stochastic…
The multi-armed restless bandit problem is studied in the case where the pay-off distributions are stationary $\varphi$-mixing. This version of the problem provides a more realistic model for most real-world applications, but cannot be…
We study the multi-armed bandit problem where the rewards are realizations of general non-stationary stochastic processes, a setting that generalizes many existing lines of work and analyses. In particular, we present a theoretical analysis…
Contextual bandit algorithms have transformed modern experimentation by enabling real-time adaptation for personalized treatment and efficient use of data. Yet these advantages create challenges for statistical inference due to adaptivity.…
Past research on interactive decision making problems (bandits, reinforcement learning, etc.) mostly focuses on the minimax regret that measures the algorithm's performance on the hardest instance. However, an ideal algorithm should adapt…
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…
In stochastic convex optimization problems, most existing adaptive methods rely on prior knowledge about the diameter bound $D$ when the smoothness or the Lipschitz constant is unknown. This often significantly affects performance as only a…
We study regret minimization in a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting and establish a fundamental trade-off between the regret suffered under an algorithm, and its statistical robustness. Considering broad classes of underlying arms'…
A recent work by Schlisselberg et al. (2024) studies a delay-as-payoff model for stochastic multi-armed bandits, where the payoff (either loss or reward) is delayed for a period that is proportional to the payoff itself. While this captures…
In a multi-armed bandit problem, an online algorithm chooses from a set of strategies in a sequence of trials so as to maximize the total payoff of the chosen strategies. While the performance of bandit algorithms with a small finite…