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Most bandit algorithm designs are purely theoretical. Therefore, they have strong regret guarantees, but also are often too conservative in practice. In this work, we pioneer the idea of algorithm design by minimizing the empirical Bayes…
Information-directed sampling (IDS) is a powerful framework for solving bandit problems which has shown strong results in both Bayesian and frequentist settings. However, frequentist IDS, like many other bandit algorithms, requires that one…
Efficient global optimization is a widely used method for optimizing expensive black-box functions such as tuning hyperparameter, and designing new material, etc. Despite its popularity, less attention has been paid to analyzing the…
This paper is in the field of stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits (MABs), i.e. those sequential selection techniques able to learn online using only the feedback given by the chosen option (a.k.a. $arm$). We study a particular case of the rested…
We study a stochastic bandit problem with a general unknown reward function and a general unknown constraint function. Both functions can be non-linear (even non-convex) and are assumed to lie in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS)…
We consider the sequential optimization of an unknown, continuous, and expensive to evaluate reward function, from noisy and adversarially corrupted observed rewards. When the corruption attacks are subject to a suitable budget $C$ and the…
We study the $K$-armed dueling bandit problem, a variation of the standard stochastic bandit problem where the feedback is limited to relative comparisons of a pair of arms. We introduce a tight asymptotic regret lower bound that is based…
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…
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 introduce a new stochastic smoothing perspective to study adversarial contextual bandit problems. We propose a general algorithm template that represents random perturbation based algorithms and identify several perturbation…
We study the benefits of sparsity in nonparametric contextual bandit problems, in which the set of candidate features is countably or uncountably infinite. Our contribution is two-fold. First, using a novel reduction to sequences of…
This paper analyses the problem of Gaussian process (GP) bandits with deterministic observations. The analysis uses a branch and bound algorithm that is related to the UCB algorithm of (Srinivas et al., 2010). For GPs with Gaussian…
Gaussian process (GP) bandits provide a powerful framework for performing blackbox optimization of unknown functions. The characteristics of the unknown function depend heavily on the assumed GP prior. Most work in the literature assume…
The paper considers the problem of global optimization in the setup of stochastic process bandits. We introduce an UCB algorithm which builds a cascade of discretization trees based on generic chaining in order to render possible his…
The expected improvement (EI) algorithm is one of the most popular strategies for optimization under uncertainty due to its simplicity and efficiency. Despite its popularity, the theoretical aspects of this algorithm have not been properly…
Autoregressive processes naturally arise in a large variety of real-world scenarios, including stock markets, sales forecasting, weather prediction, advertising, and pricing. When facing a sequential decision-making problem in such a…
In this paper, we improve the regret bound for online kernel selection under bandit feedback. Previous algorithm enjoys a $O((\Vert f\Vert^2_{\mathcal{H}_i}+1)K^{\frac{1}{3}}T^{\frac{2}{3}})$ expected bound for Lipschitz loss functions. We…
This work addresses the problem of regret minimization in non-stochastic multi-armed bandit problems, focusing on performance guarantees that hold with high probability. Such results are rather scarce in the literature since proving them…
We provide new lower bounds on the regret that must be suffered by adversarial bandit algorithms. The new results show that recent upper bounds that either (a) hold with high-probability or (b) depend on the total lossof the best arm or (c)…
Gaussian process upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) is a theoretically promising approach for black-box optimization; however, the confidence parameter $\beta$ is considerably large in the theorem and chosen heuristically in practice. Then,…