Related papers: A PAC algorithm in relative precision for bandit p…
Motivated by models of human decision making proposed to explain commonly observed deviations from conventional expected value preferences, we formulate two stochastic multi-armed bandit problems with distorted probabilities on the reward…
This paper investigates a hitherto unaddressed aspect of best arm identification (BAI) in stochastic multi-armed bandits in the fixed-confidence setting. Two key metrics for assessing bandit algorithms are computational efficiency and…
In the Best-$k$-Arm problem, we are given $n$ stochastic bandit arms, each associated with an unknown reward distribution. We are required to identify the $k$ arms with the largest means by taking as few samples as possible. In this paper,…
Contextual bandits are widely-used in the study of learning-based control policies for finite action spaces. While the problem is well-studied for bandits with perfectly observed context vectors, little is known about the case of…
We consider a bandit optimization problem for nonconvex and non-smooth functions, where in each trial the loss function is the sum of a linear function and a small but arbitrary perturbation chosen after observing the player's choice. We…
We provide a simple method to combine stochastic bandit algorithms. Our approach is based on a "meta-UCB" procedure that treats each of $N$ individual bandit algorithms as arms in a higher-level $N$-armed bandit problem that we solve with a…
Stochastic optimization is a widely used approach for optimization under uncertainty, where uncertain input parameters are modeled by random variables. Exact or approximation algorithms have been obtained for several fundamental problems in…
We consider bandit problems involving a large (possibly infinite) collection of arms, in which the expected reward of each arm is a linear function of an $r$-dimensional random vector $\mathbf{Z} \in \mathbb{R}^r$, where $r \geq 2$. The…
We propose a stochastic approximation method for approximating the efficient frontier of chance-constrained nonlinear programs. Our approach is based on a bi-objective viewpoint of chance-constrained programs that seeks solutions on the…
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 study the problem of corralling stochastic bandit algorithms, that is combining multiple bandit algorithms designed for a stochastic environment, with the goal of devising a corralling algorithm that performs almost as well as the best…
We consider a general multi-armed bandit problem with correlated (and simple contextual and restless) elements, as a relaxed control problem. By introducing an entropy regularisation, we obtain a smooth asymptotic approximation to the value…
This paper investigates stochastic and adversarial combinatorial multi-armed bandit problems. In the stochastic setting under semi-bandit feedback, we derive a problem-specific regret lower bound, and discuss its scaling with the dimension…
We consider the problem of adaptively placing sensors along an interval to detect stochastically-generated events. We present a new formulation of the problem as a continuum-armed bandit problem with feedback in the form of partial…
Bandits with Knapsacks (BwK), the generalization of the Bandits problem under global budget constraints, has received a lot of attention in recent years. Previous work has focused on one of the two extremes: Stochastic BwK where the rewards…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation. Existing algorithms for this problem only have high-probability regret and/or Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) sample complexity guarantees, which cannot guarantee…
We investigate the adversarial bandit problem with multiple plays under semi-bandit feedback. We introduce a highly efficient algorithm that asymptotically achieves the performance of the best switching $m$-arm strategy with minimax optimal…
We consider the stochastic linear (multi-armed) contextual bandit problem with the possibility of hidden simple multi-armed bandit structure in which the rewards are independent of the contextual information. Algorithms that are designed…
We present the first high-probability optimal regret bound for a policy optimization technique applied to the problem of stochastic contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) with general offline function approximation. Our algorithm is both…
We consider a multi-armed bandit problem in a setting where each arm produces a noisy reward realization which depends on an observable random covariate. As opposed to the traditional static multi-armed bandit problem, this setting allows…