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Much of the recent literature on bandit learning focuses on algorithms that aim to converge on an optimal action. One shortcoming is that this orientation does not account for time sensitivity, which can play a crucial role when learning an…
Multi-armed bandit problems are the predominant theoretical model of exploration-exploitation tradeoffs in learning, and they have countless applications ranging from medical trials, to communication networks, to Web search and advertising.…
We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with i.i.d. rewards where the expected reward function is multimodal with at most m modes. We propose the first known computationally tractable algorithm for computing the solution to the…
This paper proposes a new algorithm, referred to as GMAB, that combines concepts from the reinforcement learning domain of multi-armed bandits and random search strategies from the domain of genetic algorithms to solve discrete stochastic…
We consider the combinatorial bandits problem, where at each time step, the online learner selects a size-$k$ subset $s$ from the arms set $\mathcal{A}$, where $\left|\mathcal{A}\right| = n$, and observes a stochastic reward of each arm in…
The evaluation of hyperparameters, neural architectures, or data augmentation policies becomes a critical model selection problem in advanced deep learning with a large hyperparameter search space. In this paper, we propose an efficient and…
We study Thompson Sampling-based algorithms for stochastic bandits with bounded rewards. As the existing problem-dependent regret bound for Thompson Sampling with Gaussian priors [Agrawal and Goyal, 2017] is vacuous when $T \le 288 e^{64}$,…
Thanks to the power of representation learning, neural contextual bandit algorithms demonstrate remarkable performance improvement against their classical counterparts. But because their exploration has to be performed in the entire neural…
We investigate the regret-minimisation problem in a multi-armed bandit setting with arbitrary corruptions. Similar to the classical setup, the agent receives rewards generated independently from the distribution of the arm chosen at each…
We consider a replicable stochastic multi-armed bandit algorithm that ensures, with high probability, that the algorithm's sequence of actions is not affected by the randomness inherent in the dataset. Replicability allows third parties to…
We consider stochastic multi-armed bandits where the expected reward is a unimodal function over partially ordered arms. This important class of problems has been recently investigated in (Cope 2009, Yu 2011). The set of arms is either…
Reinforcement learning is an attractive approach to learn good resource allocation and scheduling policies based on data when the system model is unknown. However, the cumulative regret of most RL algorithms scales as $\tilde O(\mathsf{S}…
We propose algorithms based on a multi-level Thompson sampling scheme, for the stochastic multi-armed bandit and its contextual variant with linear expected rewards, in the setting where arms are clustered. We show, both theoretically and…
Efficient exploration in bandits is a fundamental online learning problem. We propose a variant of Thompson sampling that learns to explore better as it interacts with bandit instances drawn from an unknown prior. The algorithm meta-learns…
We study the corrupted bandit problem, i.e. a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with $k$ unknown reward distributions, which are heavy-tailed and corrupted by a history-independent adversary or Nature. To be specific, the reward…
We study the stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem under worst-case regret and heavy-tailed reward distribution. We modify the minimax policy MOSS for the sub-Gaussian reward distribution by using saturated empirical mean to design a…
The stochastic multi-armed bandit setting has been recently studied in the non-stationary regime, where the mean payoff of each action is a non-decreasing function of the number of rounds passed since it was last played. This model captures…
Multi-armed bandit problems are the most basic examples of sequential decision problems with an exploration-exploitation trade-off. This is the balance between staying with the option that gave highest payoffs in the past and exploring new…
In this work, we study the performance of the Thompson Sampling algorithm for Contextual Bandit problems based on the framework introduced by Neu et al. and their concept of lifted information ratio. First, we prove a comprehensive bound on…
Most bandit algorithms assume that the reward variances or their upper bounds are known, and that they are the same for all arms. This naturally leads to suboptimal performance and higher regret due to variance overestimation. On the other…