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Time-constrained decision processes have been ubiquitous in many fundamental applications in physics, biology and computer science. Recently, restart strategies have gained significant attention for boosting the efficiency of…
Stochastic multi-armed bandits (MABs) provide a fundamental reinforcement learning model to study sequential decision making in uncertain environments. The upper confidence bounds (UCB) algorithm gave birth to the renaissance of bandit…
We study the multi-armed bandit problem where the rewards are realizations of general non-stationary stochastic processes, a setting that generalizes many existing lines of work and analyses. In particular, we present a theoretical analysis…
We consider minimisation of dynamic regret in non-stationary bandits with a slowly varying property. Namely, we assume that arms' rewards are stochastic and independent over time, but that the absolute difference between the expected…
There has been a recent surge of interest in nonparametric bandit algorithms based on subsampling. One drawback however of these approaches is the additional complexity required by random subsampling and the storage of the full history of…
We study the problem of regret minimization in a multi-armed bandit setup where the agent is allowed to play multiple arms at each round by spreading the resources usually allocated to only one arm. At each iteration the agent selects a…
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…
We study the problem of worst case regret in piecewise stationary multi armed bandits. While the minimax theory for stationary bandits is well established, understanding analogous limits in time-varying settings is challenging. Existing…
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…
Real-world contextual bandit problems with complex reward models are often tackled with iteratively trained models, such as boosting trees. However, it is difficult to directly apply simple and effective exploration strategies--such as…
We consider the stochastic bandit problem with a continuous set of arms, with the expected reward function over the arms assumed to be fixed but unknown. We provide two new Gaussian process-based algorithms for continuous bandit…
Modifying the reward-biased maximum likelihood method originally proposed in the adaptive control literature, we propose novel learning algorithms to handle the explore-exploit trade-off in linear bandits problems as well as generalized…
We study a variant of the bandit problem where side information in the form of bounds on the mean of each arm is provided. We prove that these translate to tighter estimates of subgaussian factors and develop novel algorithms that exploit…
This paper introduces the framework of multi-armed sampling, which serves as the sampling counterpart to the optimization problem of multi-armed bandits. Our primary motivation is to rigorously examine the exploration-exploitation trade-off…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a classical learning task that exemplifies the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. However, standard formulations do not take into account {\em risk}. In online decision making systems, risk is a…
We introduce a new stochastic smoothing perspective to study adversarial contextual bandit problems. We propose a general algorithm template that represents random perturbation based algorithms and identify several perturbation…
We study the problem of learning 'good' interventions in a stochastic environment modeled by its underlying causal graph. Good interventions refer to interventions that maximize rewards. Specifically, we consider the setting of a…
The piecewise-stationary bandit problem is an important variant of the multi-armed bandit problem that further considers abrupt changes in the reward distributions. The main theme of the problem is the trade-off between exploration for…
Learning in multi-player games can model a large variety of practical scenarios, where each player seeks to optimize its own local objective function, which at the same time relies on the actions taken by others. Motivated by the frequent…
Due to the broad range of applications of stochastic multi-armed bandit model, understanding the effects of adversarial attacks and designing bandit algorithms robust to attacks are essential for the safe applications of this model. In this…