Related papers: Improved Algorithms for Conservative Exploration i…

Safety is a desirable property that can immensely increase the applicability of learning algorithms in real-world decision-making problems. It is much easier for a company to deploy an algorithm that is safe, i.e., guaranteed to perform at…

Conservative Contextual Bandits (CCBs) address safety in sequential decision making by requiring that an agent's policy, along with minimizing regret, also satisfies a safety constraint: the performance is not worse than a baseline policy…

Conservative mechanism is a desirable property in decision-making problems which balance the tradeoff between the exploration and exploitation. We propose the novel \emph{conservative contextual combinatorial cascading bandit…

In this paper, we propose and study opportunistic contextual bandits - a special case of contextual bandits where the exploration cost varies under different environmental conditions, such as network load or return variation in…

Bandit algorithms have various application in safety-critical systems, where it is important to respect the system constraints that rely on the bandit's unknown parameters at every round. In this paper, we formulate a linear stochastic…

We study a novel multi-armed bandit problem that models the challenge faced by a company wishing to explore new strategies to maximize revenue whilst simultaneously maintaining their revenue above a fixed baseline, uniformly over time.…

Motivated by applications of bandit algorithms in education, we consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with $\varepsilon$-contaminated rewards. We allow an adversary to give arbitrary unbounded contaminated rewards with full…

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…

Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the strategy deployed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. Further, often we have only partial information on the state of the system. We study the…

We propose a simple model selection approach for algorithms in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. As opposed to prior work that (implicitly) assumes knowledge of the optimal regret, we only require that each base…

We consider a resource-aware variant of the classical multi-armed bandit problem: In each round, the learner selects an arm and determines a resource limit. It then observes a corresponding (random) reward, provided the (random) amount of…

Continuously learning and leveraging the knowledge accumulated from prior tasks in order to improve future performance is a long standing machine learning problem. In this paper, we study the problem in the multi-armed bandit framework with…

We study how to learn optimal interventions sequentially given causal information represented as a causal graph along with associated conditional distributions. Causal modeling is useful in real world problems like online advertisement…

In this paper, we investigate the impact of context diversity on stochastic linear contextual bandits. As opposed to the previous view that contexts lead to more difficult bandit learning, we show that when the contexts are sufficiently…

Conversational contextual bandits elicit user preferences by occasionally querying for explicit feedback on key-terms to accelerate learning. However, there are aspects of existing approaches which limit their performance. First,…

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.,…

We study how to make decisions that minimize Bayesian regret in offline linear bandits. Prior work suggests that one must take actions with maximum lower confidence bound (LCB) on their reward. We argue that the reliance on LCB is…

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 many real-world applications such as recommendation systems, multiple learning agents must balance exploration and exploitation while maintaining safety guarantees to avoid catastrophic failures. We study the stochastic linear bandit…

Autoregressive processes naturally arise in a large variety of real-world scenarios, including stock markets, sales forecasting, weather prediction, advertising, and pricing. When facing a sequential decision-making problem in such a…