Related papers: Regret Bounds for Safe Gaussian Process Bandit Opt…
Classic no-regret multi-armed bandit algorithms, including the Upper Confidence Bound (UCB), Hedge, and EXP3, are inherently unfair by design. Their unfairness stems from their objective of playing the most rewarding arm as frequently as…
We study a variant of the stochastic linear bandit problem wherein we optimize a linear objective function but rewards are accrued only orthogonal to an unknown subspace (which we interpret as a \textit{protected space}) given only…
In this paper, we study the behavior of the Upper Confidence Bound-Variance (UCB-V) algorithm for the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problems, a variant of the canonical Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithm that incorporates variance estimates…
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…
Motivated by applications in clinical trials and finance, we study the problem of online convex optimization (with bandit feedback) where the decision maker is risk-averse. We provide two algorithms to solve this problem. The first one is a…
We consider a stochastic bandit problem with a possibly infinite number of arms. We write $p^*$ for the proportion of optimal arms and $\Delta$ for the minimal mean-gap between optimal and sub-optimal arms. We characterize the optimal…
We study dynamic regret minimization in unconstrained adversarial linear bandit problems. In this setting, a learner must minimize the cumulative loss relative to an arbitrary sequence of comparators…
Gaussian Processes (GPs) are widely employed in control and learning because of their principled treatment of uncertainty. However, tracking uncertainty for iterative, multi-step predictions in general leads to an analytically intractable…
We consider Bayesian optimization using Gaussian Process models, also referred to as kernel-based bandit optimization. We study the methodology of exploring the domain using random samples drawn from a distribution. We show that this random…
In this paper, we consider the problem of Gaussian process (GP) optimization with an added robustness requirement: The returned point may be perturbed by an adversary, and we require the function value to remain as high as possible even…
We consider stochastic bandit problems with a continuous set of arms and where the expected reward is a continuous and unimodal function of the arm. No further assumption is made regarding the smoothness and the structure of the expected…
Fast changing states or volatile environments pose a significant challenge to online optimization, which needs to perform rapid adaptation under limited observation. In this paper, we give query and regret optimal bandit algorithms under…
We study the adaptive control of an unknown linear system with a quadratic cost function subject to safety constraints on both the states and actions. The challenges of this problem arise from the tension among safety, exploration,…
We consider a sequential decision-making problem where an agent can take one action at a time and each action has a stochastic temporal extent, i.e., a new action cannot be taken until the previous one is finished. Upon completion, the…
We present differentially private algorithms for the stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem. This is a problem for applications such as adaptive clinical trials, experiment design, and user-targeted advertising where private…
We study the linear contextual bandit problem with finite action sets. When the problem dimension is $d$, the time horizon is $T$, and there are $n \leq 2^{d/2}$ candidate actions per time period, we (1) show that the minimax expected…
Stochastic linear bandits are a fundamental model for sequential decision making, where an agent selects a vector-valued action and receives a noisy reward with expected value given by an unknown linear function. Although well studied in…
The Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem is challenging in non-stationary environments where reward distributions evolve dynamically. We introduce RAVEN-UCB, a novel algorithm that combines theoretical rigor with practical efficiency via…
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…
Many settings involve sequential decision-making where a set of actions can be chosen at each time step, each action provides a stochastic reward, and the distribution for the reward of each action is initially unknown. However, frequent…