Related papers: An Index-based Deterministic Asymptotically Optima…
We study the problem of Gaussian bandits with general side information, as first introduced by Wu, Szepesvari, and Gyorgy. In this setting, the play of an arm reveals information about other arms, according to an arbitrary a priori known…
Motivated by an open direction in existing literature, we study the 1-identification problem, a fundamental multi-armed bandit formulation on pure exploration. The goal is to determine whether there exists an arm whose mean reward is at…
We study the best-arm identification problem in linear bandit, where the rewards of the arms depend linearly on an unknown parameter $\theta^*$ and the objective is to return the arm with the largest reward. We characterize the complexity…
We address the problem of finding the maximizer of a nonlinear smooth function, that can only be evaluated point-wise, subject to constraints on the number of permitted function evaluations. This problem is also known as fixed-budget best…
We study the problem of best arm identification in linear bandits in the fixed-budget setting. By leveraging properties of the G-optimal design and incorporating it into the arm allocation rule, we design a parameter-free algorithm, Optimal…
The dynamic allocation problem, also known as the `multi-armed bandit' problem, simulates a situation in which an agent is faced with a tradeoff between actions that yield an immediate reward and actions whose benefits can only be perceived…
We consider a bandit problem where the buget is smaller than the number of arms, which may be infinite. In this regime, the usual objective in the literature is to minimize simple regret. To analyze broad classes of distributions with…
We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting and study the problem of constrained regret minimization over a given time horizon. Each arm is associated with an unknown, possibly multi-dimensional distribution, and the merit of an arm…
We consider the Max $K$-Armed Bandit problem, where a learning agent is faced with several sources (arms) of items (rewards), and interested in finding the best item overall. At each time step the agent chooses an arm, and obtains a random…
This paper investigates the best arm identification (BAI) problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits in the fixed confidence setting. The general class of the exponential family of bandits is considered. The existing algorithms for the…
A sampling-based method is introduced to approximate the Gittins index for a general family of alternative bandit processes. The approximation consists of a truncation of the optimization horizon and support for the immediate rewards, an…
We consider the best arm identification problem in the stochastic multi-armed bandit framework where each arm has a tiny probability of realizing large rewards while with overwhelming probability the reward is zero. A key application of…
In fixed budget bandit identification, an algorithm sequentially observes samples from several distributions up to a given final time. It then answers a query about the set of distributions. A good algorithm will have a small probability of…
Decision making under uncertain environments in the maximization of expected reward while minimizing its risk is one of the ubiquitous problems in many subjects. Here, we introduce a novel problem setting in stochastic bandit optimization…
We consider a stochastic sparse linear bandit problem where only a sparse subset of context features affects the expected reward function, i.e., the unknown reward parameter has a sparse structure. In the existing Lasso bandit literature,…
We consider the Max $K$-Armed Bandit problem, where a learning agent is faced with several stochastic arms, each a source of i.i.d. rewards of unknown distribution. At each time step the agent chooses an arm, and observes the reward of the…
Combinatorial bandits with semi-bandit feedback generalize multi-armed bandits, where the agent chooses sets of arms and observes a noisy reward for each arm contained in the chosen set. The action set satisfies a given structure such as…
We study best-arm identification with fixed confidence in bandit models with graph smoothness constraint. We provide and analyze an efficient gradient ascent algorithm to compute the sample complexity of this problem as a solution of a…
This paper proposes near-optimal algorithms for the pure-exploration linear bandit problem in the fixed confidence and fixed budget settings. Leveraging ideas from the theory of suprema of empirical processes, we provide an algorithm whose…
This paper studies a sequential decision problem where payoff distributions are known and where the riskiness of payoffs matters. Equivalently, it studies sequential choice from a repeated set of independent lotteries. The decision-maker is…