Related papers: A PAC algorithm in relative precision for bandit p…
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…
Approximate Bayesian computation is an established and popular method for likelihood-free inference with applications in many disciplines. The effectiveness of the method depends critically on the availability of well performing summary…
In this work, we develop linear bandit algorithms that automatically adapt to different environments. By plugging a novel loss estimator into the optimization problem that characterizes the instance-optimal strategy, our first algorithm not…
In this paper we adapt the nearest neighbour rule to the contextual bandit problem. Our algorithm handles the fully adversarial setting in which no assumptions at all are made about the data-generation process. When combined with a…
Many stochastic optimization algorithms work by estimating the gradient of the cost function on the fly by sampling datapoints uniformly at random from a training set. However, the estimator might have a large variance, which inadvertently…
For the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem from a constrained model that generalizes the classical one, we show that an asymptotic optimality is achievable by a simple strategy extended from the $\epsilon_t$-greedy strategy. We…
We study the problem of selecting $K$ arms with the highest expected rewards in a stochastic $n$-armed bandit game. This problem has a wide range of applications, e.g., A/B testing, crowdsourcing, simulation optimization. Our goal is to…
In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective…
We consider the classic problem of $(\epsilon,\delta)$-PAC learning a best arm where the goal is to identify with confidence $1-\delta$ an arm whose mean is an $\epsilon$-approximation to that of the highest mean arm in a multi-armed bandit…
Probabilistic variants of Model Order Reduction (MOR) methods have recently emerged for improving stability and computational performance of classical approaches. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic Reduced Basis Method (RBM) for the…
The restless bandit problem is one of the most well-studied generalizations of the celebrated stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory. In its ultimate generality, the restless bandit problem is known to be PSPACE-Hard to…
We study a regret minimization problem with the existence of multiple best/near-optimal arms in the multi-armed bandit setting. We consider the case when the number of arms/actions is comparable or much larger than the time horizon, and…
The improving multi-armed bandits problem is a formal model for allocating effort under uncertainty, motivated by scenarios such as investing research effort into new technologies, performing clinical trials, and hyperparameter selection…
In a fixed-confidence pure exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits, an algorithm iteratively samples arms and should stop as early as possible and return the correct answer to a query about the arms distributions. We are…
Stochastic multi-armed bandits form a class of online learning problems that have important applications in online recommendation systems, adaptive medical treatment, and many others. Even though potential attacks against these learning…
We consider a multi-armed bandit problem motivated by situations where only the extreme values, as opposed to expected values in the classical bandit setting, are of interest. We propose distribution free algorithms using robust statistics…
In this paper, we introduce a multi-armed bandit problem termed max-min grouped bandits, in which the arms are arranged in possibly-overlapping groups, and the goal is to find the group whose worst arm has the highest mean reward. This…
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 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 a specific \textit{combinatorial pure exploration stochastic bandit problem} where the learner aims at finding the set of arms whose means are above a given threshold, up to a given precision, and \textit{for a fixed time horizon}.…