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This work considers a repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal can only interact with her environment through the agent. The principal and the agent have misaligned objectives and the choice of action is only left to the…
We study a grouped bandit setting where each arm comprises multiple independent sub-arms referred to as attributes. Each attribute of each arm has an independent stochastic reward. We impose the constraint that for an arm to be deemed…
We propose a new strategy for best-arm identification with fixed confidence of Gaussian variables with bounded means and unit variance. This strategy, called Exploration-Biased Sampling, is not only asymptotically optimal: it is to the best…
We study Thompson Sampling algorithms for stochastic multi-armed bandits in the batched setting, in which we want to minimize the regret over a sequence of arm pulls using a small number of policy changes (or, batches). We propose two…
We study the preference-based pure exploration problem for bandits with vector-valued rewards. The rewards are ordered using a (given) preference cone $\mathcal{C}$ and our goal is to identify the set of Pareto optimal arms. First, to…
This paper studies the Bayesian regret of the Thompson Sampling algorithm for bandit problems, building on the information-theoretic framework introduced by Russo and Van Roy (2015). Specifically, it extends the rate-distortion analysis of…
Sponsored search positions are typically allocated through real-time auctions, where the outcomes depend on advertisers' quality-adjusted bids - the product of their bids and quality scores. Although quality scoring helps promote ads with…
We study a type of Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problems in which arms with a Gaussian reward feedback are clustered. Such an arm setting finds applications in many real-world problems, for example, mmWave communications and portfolio…
The computational costs of inference and planning have confined Bayesian model-based reinforcement learning to one of two dismal fates: powerful Bayes-adaptive planning but only for simplistic models, or powerful, Bayesian non-parametric…
In this paper, we study sequential decision-making for maximizing the Sharpe ratio (SR) in a stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) setting. Unlike standard bandit formulations that maximize cumulative reward, SR optimization requires…
We study the repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal indirectly interacts with the unknown environment by proposing incentives for the agent to play arms. Most existing work assumes the agent has full knowledge of the…
Restless bandit problems are instances of non-stationary multi-armed bandits. These problems have been studied well from the optimization perspective, where the goal is to efficiently find a near-optimal policy when system parameters are…
We study a variant of the thresholding bandit problem (TBP) in the context of outlier detection, where the objective is to identify the outliers whose rewards are above a threshold. Distinct from the traditional TBP, the threshold is…
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…
We integrate information-theoretic concepts into the design and analysis of optimistic algorithms and Thompson sampling. By making a connection between information-theoretic quantities and confidence bounds, we obtain results that relate…
We study the challenging exploration incentive problem in both bandit and reinforcement learning, where the rewards are scale-free and potentially unbounded, driven by real-world scenarios and differing from existing work. Past works in…
Efficient selection among multiple generative models is increasingly important in modern generative AI, where sampling from suboptimal models is costly. This problem can be formulated as a multi-armed bandit task. Under diversity-aware…
Sampling from distributions to find the one with the largest mean arises in a broad range of applications, and it can be mathematically modeled as a multi-armed bandit problem in which each distribution is associated with an arm. This paper…
In linear contextual bandits, the objective is to select actions that maximize cumulative rewards, modeled as a linear function with unknown parameters. Although Thompson Sampling performs well empirically, it does not achieve optimal…
Thompson sampling is one of the most widely used algorithms for many online decision problems, due to its simplicity in implementation and superior empirical performance over other state-of-the-art methods. Despite its popularity and…