Related papers: Learning with Good Feature Representations in Band…
We consider multi-armed bandit problems in social groups wherein each individual has bounded memory and shares the common goal of learning the best arm/option. We say an individual learns the best option if eventually (as $t \to \infty$) it…
We study stage-wise conservative linear stochastic bandits: an instance of bandit optimization, which accounts for (unknown) safety constraints that appear in applications such as online advertising and medical trials. At each stage, the…
Stochastic linear bandits are a natural and well-studied model for structured exploration/exploitation problems and are widely used in applications such as online marketing and recommendation. One of the main challenges faced by…
In this theoretical paper we are concerned with the problem of learning a value function by a smooth general function approximator, to solve a deterministic episodic control problem in a large continuous state space. It is shown that…
The framework of feedback graphs is a generalization of sequential decision-making with bandit or full information feedback. In this work, we study an extension where the directed feedback graph is stochastic, following a distribution…
One of the primary challenges in large-scale distributed learning stems from stringent communication constraints. While several recent works address this challenge for static optimization problems, sequential decision-making under…
We demonstrate that a wide array of machine learning algorithms are specific instances of one single paradigm: reciprocal learning. These instances range from active learning over multi-armed bandits to self-training. We show that all these…
The problem of stochastic convex optimization with bandit feedback (in the learning community) or without knowledge of gradients (in the optimization community) has received much attention in recent years, in the form of algorithms and…
We study the Lipschitz bandit problem, where a learner sequentially maximizes an unknown Lipschitz function $f$ over a domain $\mathcal{X} \subset [0,1]^d$ using noisy pointwise evaluations. Existing regret bounds are either worst-case,…
Motivated by models of human decision making proposed to explain commonly observed deviations from conventional expected value preferences, we formulate two stochastic multi-armed bandit problems with distorted probabilities on the reward…
Ranking algorithms are fundamental to various online platforms across e-commerce sites to content streaming services. Our research addresses the challenge of adaptively ranking items from a candidate pool for heterogeneous users, a key…
In this paper, we study the problem of regret minimization for episodic Reinforcement Learning (RL) both in the model-free and the model-based setting. We focus on learning with general function classes and general model classes, and we…
We study \emph{multi-armed bandits} (MABs) augmented with \emph{best-action queries}, in which the learner may additionally query an oracle that reveals the best arm in the current round. This setting was recently characterized by Russo et…
We investigate the contextual bandits with knapsack (CBwK) problem in a high-dimensional linear setting, where the feature dimension can be very large. Our goal is to harness sparsity to obtain sharper regret guarantees. To this end, we…
In many bandit problems, the maximal reward achievable by a policy is often unknown in advance. We consider the problem of estimating the optimal policy value in the sublinear data regime before the optimal policy is even learnable. We…
In this paper, we study the problem of Gaussian process (GP) bandits under relaxed optimization criteria stating that any function value above a certain threshold is "good enough". On the theoretical side, we study various {\em lenient…
In this paper, we study the contextual multinomial logit (MNL) bandit problem in which a learning agent sequentially selects an assortment based on contextual information, and user feedback follows an MNL choice model. There has been a…
We consider a sequential assortment selection problem where the user choice is given by a multinomial logit (MNL) choice model whose parameters are unknown. In each period, the learning agent observes a $d$-dimensional contextual…
Contextual bandits serve as a fundamental model for many sequential decision making tasks. The most popular theoretically justified approaches are based on the optimism principle. While these algorithms can be practical, they are known to…
We obtain essentially tight upper bounds for a strengthened notion of regret in the stochastic linear bandits framework. The strengthening -- referred to as Nash regret -- is defined as the difference between the (a priori unknown) optimum…