Related papers: Regret Bounds for Safe Gaussian Process Bandit Opt…
We study the Gaussian process (GP) bandit problem, whose goal is to minimize regret under an unknown reward function lying in some reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). The maximum posterior variance analysis is vital in analyzing…
We study a widely used Bayesian optimization method, Gaussian process Thompson sampling (GP-TS), under the assumption that the objective function is a sample path from a GP. Compared with the GP upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) with…
The contextual bandit framework is widely used to solve sequential optimization problems where the reward of each decision depends on auxiliary context variables. In settings such as medicine, business, and engineering, the decision maker…
Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithms are a widely-used class of sequential algorithms for the $K$-armed bandit problem. Despite extensive research over the past decades aimed at understanding their asymptotic and (near) minimax…
The Gaussian process bandit is a problem in which we want to find a maximizer of a black-box function with the minimum number of function evaluations. If the black-box function varies with time, then time-varying Bayesian optimization is a…
A stochastic combinatorial semi-bandit is an online learning problem where at each step a learning agent chooses a subset of ground items subject to constraints, and then observes stochastic weights of these items and receives their sum as…
In order to improve the performance of Bayesian optimisation, we develop a modified Gaussian process upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) acquisition function. This is done by sampling the exploration-exploitation trade-off parameter from a…
In many scientific and engineering applications, we are tasked with the maximisation of an expensive to evaluate black box function $f$. Traditional settings for this problem assume just the availability of this single function. However, in…
In this study, we propose a new method for constructing UCB-type algorithms for stochastic multi-armed bandits based on general convex optimization methods with an inexact oracle. We derive the regret bounds corresponding to the convergence…
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…
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…
Many real-world optimization problems involve an expensive ground-truth oracle (e.g., human evaluation, physical experiments) and a cheap, low-fidelity prediction oracle (e.g., machine learning models, simulations). Meanwhile, abundant…
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…
In this paper, the problem of maximizing a black-box function $f:\mathcal{X} \to \mathbb{R}$ is studied in the Bayesian framework with a Gaussian Process (GP) prior. In particular, a new algorithm for this problem is proposed, and high…
Can one parallelize complex exploration exploitation tradeoffs? As an example, consider the problem of optimal high-throughput experimental design, where we wish to sequentially design batches of experiments in order to simultaneously learn…
Gaussian process upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) is widely used for sequential optimization of expensive black-box functions. Although many upper bounds on its cumulative regret have been established in the literature, whether GP-UCB is…
Gaussian processes (GP) are a well studied Bayesian approach for the optimization of black-box functions. Despite their effectiveness in simple problems, GP-based algorithms hardly scale to high-dimensional functions, as their per-iteration…
Bayesian optimization (BO) with Gaussian process (GP) surrogate models is a powerful black-box optimization method. Acquisition functions are a critical part of a BO algorithm as they determine how the new samples are selected. Some of the…
We propose a novel combinatorial stochastic-greedy bandit (SGB) algorithm for combinatorial multi-armed bandit problems when no extra information other than the joint reward of the selected set of $n$ arms at each time step $t\in [T]$ is…
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…