Related papers: Best Arm Identification for Cascading Bandits in t…
We study the best-arm identification problem with fixed confidence when contextual (covariate) information is available in stochastic bandits. Although we can use contextual information in each round, we are interested in the marginalized…
The classic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem tackles the challenge of accruing maximum reward while making decisions under uncertainty. However, in applications, often the goal is to minimize cost subject to a constraint on the minimum…
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…
We consider the best-arm identification problem in multi-armed bandits, which focuses purely on exploration. A player is given a fixed budget to explore a finite set of arms, and the rewards of each arm are drawn independently from a fixed,…
We consider a novel stochastic multi-armed bandit setting, where playing an arm makes it unavailable for a fixed number of time slots thereafter. This models situations where reusing an arm too often is undesirable (e.g. making the same…
Classical multi-armed bandit problems use the expected value of an arm as a metric to evaluate its goodness. However, the expected value is a risk-neutral metric. In many applications like finance, one is interested in balancing the…
We study the combinatorial pure exploration problem Best-Set in stochastic multi-armed bandits. In a Best-Set instance, we are given $n$ arms with unknown reward distributions, as well as a family $\mathcal{F}$ of feasible subsets over the…
We study best-arm identification in stochastic dueling bandits under the sole assumption that a Condorcet winner exists, i.e., an arm that wins each noisy pairwise comparison with probability at least $1/2$. We introduce a new…
In this work, we address the open problem of finding low-complexity near-optimal multi-armed bandit algorithms for sequential decision making problems. Existing bandit algorithms are either sub-optimal and computationally simple (e.g.,…
Motivated by problems of learning to rank long item sequences, we introduce a variant of the cascading bandit model that considers flexible length sequences with varying rewards and losses. We formulate two generative models for this…
Consider a requester who wishes to crowdsource a series of identical binary labeling tasks to a pool of workers so as to achieve an assured accuracy for each task, in a cost optimal way. The workers are heterogeneous with unknown but fixed…
By exploiting ultrafast and irregular time series generated by lasers with delayed feedback, we have previously demonstrated a scalable algorithm to solve multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems utilizing the time-division multiplexing of laser…
Recent work has considered natural variations of the multi-armed bandit problem, where the reward distribution of each arm is a special function of the time passed since its last pulling. In this direction, a simple (yet widely applicable)…
Multi-armed bandit problems are considered as a paradigm of the trade-off between exploring the environment to find profitable actions and exploiting what is already known. In the stationary case, the distributions of the rewards do not…
In this paper, we study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with graph feedback. Motivated by the clinical trials and recommendation problem, we assume that two arms are connected if and only if they are similar (i.e., their means are…
In the classic Bayesian restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problem, there are $N$ arms, with rewards on all arms evolving at each time as Markov chains with known parameters. A player seeks to activate $K \geq 1$ arms at each time in order…
In pure-exploration problems, information is gathered sequentially to answer a question on the stochastic environment. While best-arm identification for linear bandits has been extensively studied in recent years, few works have been…
This paper is in the field of stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits (MABs), i.e. those sequential selection techniques able to learn online using only the feedback given by the chosen option (a.k.a. $arm$). We study a particular case of the rested…
In this paper, we study a variant of best-arm identification involving elements of risk sensitivity and communication constraints. Specifically, the goal of the learner is to identify the arm with the highest quantile reward, while the…
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…