Related papers: Problem Dependent Reinforcement Learning Bounds Wh…
In this paper, we consider the contextual variant of the MNL-Bandit problem. More specifically, we consider a dynamic set optimization problem, where a decision-maker offers a subset (assortment) of products to a consumer and observes the…
Motivated by applications in online bidding and sleeping bandits, we examine the problem of contextual bandits with cross learning, where the learner observes the loss associated with the action across all possible contexts, not just the…
Information-directed sampling (IDS) has revealed its potential as a data-efficient algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL). However, theoretical understanding of IDS for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) is still limited. We develop novel…
Online reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely applied in information processing scenarios, which usually exhibit much uncertainty due to the intrinsic randomness of channels and service demands. In this paper, we consider an…
In this paper, we present a reduction-based framework for conservative bandits and RL, in which our core technique is to calculate the necessary and sufficient budget obtained from running the baseline policy. For lower bounds, we improve…
Policy regret is a well established notion of measuring the performance of an online learning algorithm against an adaptive adversary. We study restrictions on the adversary that enable efficient minimization of the \emph{complete policy…
This paper presents a new model-free algorithm for episodic finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDP), Adaptive Multi-step Bootstrap (AMB), which enjoys a stronger gap-dependent regret bound. The first innovation is to estimate the…
This paper addresses the poor finite-horizon performance of existing online \emph{restless bandit} (RB) algorithms, which stems from the prohibitive sample complexity of learning a full \emph{Markov decision process} (MDP) for each agent.…
We consider the adversarial Markov Decision Process (MDP) problem, where the rewards for the MDP can be adversarially chosen, and the transition function can be either known or unknown. In both settings, Follow-the-PerturbedLeader (FPL)…
We consider the well-studied dueling bandit problem, where a learner aims to identify near-optimal actions using pairwise comparisons, under the constraint of differential privacy. We consider a general class of utility-based preference…
We study contextual bandits in the presence of a stage-wise constraint when the constraint must be satisfied both with high probability and in expectation. We start with the linear case where both the reward function and the stage-wise…
Multi-armed bandits (MAB) model sequential decision making problems, in which a learner sequentially chooses arms with unknown reward distributions in order to maximize its cumulative reward. Most of the prior work on MAB assumes that the…
Contextual multi-armed bandits are a popular choice to model sequential decision-making. E.g., in a healthcare application we may perform various tests to asses a patient condition (exploration) and then decide on the best treatment to give…
We consider a Markov decision process with deterministic state transition dynamics, adversarially generated rewards that change arbitrarily from round to round, and a bandit feedback model in which the decision maker only observes the…
We develop several provably efficient model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We consider both online setting and the setting with access to a simulator. In the…
We study a regret minimization problem with the existence of multiple best/near-optimal arms in the multi-armed bandit setting. We consider the case when the number of arms/actions is comparable or much larger than the time horizon, and…
Policy optimization methods are one of the most widely used classes of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. Yet, so far, such methods have been mostly analyzed from an optimization perspective, without addressing the problem of…
Policy Optimization (PO) is one of the most popular methods in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Thus, theoretical guarantees for PO algorithms have become especially important to the RL community. In this paper, we study PO in adversarial MDPs…
Bandits with covariates, a.k.a. contextual bandits, address situations where optimal actions (or arms) at a given time $t$, depend on a context $x_t$, e.g., a new patient's medical history, a consumer's past purchases. While it is…
We consider the contextual bandit problem on general action and context spaces, where the learner's rewards depend on their selected actions and an observable context. This generalizes the standard multi-armed bandit to the case where side…