Related papers: On Statistical Discrimination as a Failure of Soci…
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…
A challenging aspect of the bandit problem is that a stochastic reward is observed only for the chosen arm and the rewards of other arms remain missing. The dependence of the arm choice on the past context and reward pairs compounds the…
This paper considers stochastic bandits with side observations, a model that accounts for both the exploration/exploitation dilemma and relationships between arms. In this setting, after pulling an arm i, the decision maker also observes…
Assistance games (also known as cooperative inverse reinforcement learning games) have been proposed as a model for beneficial AI, wherein a robotic agent must act on behalf of a human principal but is initially uncertain about the humans…
We introduce the factored bandits model, which is a framework for learning with limited (bandit) feedback, where actions can be decomposed into a Cartesian product of atomic actions. Factored bandits incorporate rank-1 bandits as a special…
We consider a restless multi-armed bandit in which each arm can be in one of two states. When an arm is sampled, the state of the arm is not available to the sampler. Instead, a binary signal with a known randomness that depends on the…
Modern systems, such as digital platforms and service systems, increasingly rely on contextual bandits for online decision-making; however, their deployment can inadvertently create unfair exposure among arms, undermining long-term platform…
Scientific experimentation is largely driven by statistical hypothesis testing to determine significant differences in interventions. Traditionally, experimenters allocate samples uniformly between each intervention. However, such an…
We study the problem of repeated two-sided matching with uncertain preferences (two-sided bandits), and no explicit communication between agents. Recent work has developed algorithms that converge to stable matchings when one side (the…
We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem with delayed impact of actions. In our setting, actions taken in the past impact the arm rewards in the subsequent future. This delayed impact of actions is prevalent in the real…
Adaptive experiments are used extensively in online platforms, healthcare and biotechnology, and a variety of other settings. In many of these applications, the main goal is not to precisely estimate a treatment effect, but to demonstrate…
We consider a stochastic bandit problem with countably many arms that belong to a finite set of types, each characterized by a unique mean reward. In addition, there is a fixed distribution over types which sets the proportion of each type…
We consider the restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problem with unknown dynamics in which a player chooses M out of N arms to play at each time. The reward state of each arm transits according to an unknown Markovian rule when it is played…
Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…
We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting where reward must be actively queried for it to be observed. We provide tight lower and upper problem-dependent guarantees on both the regret and the number of queries. Interestingly, we…
We study bandit learning in matching markets, where players and arms constitute the two market sides, and the players' utilities are linear in the arm contexts. In each round, new arms arrive with observable contexts. Then, the algorithm…
Multi-armed bandit problems (MABPs) are a special type of optimal control problem well suited to model resource allocation under uncertainty in a wide variety of contexts. Since the first publication of the optimal solution of the classic…
We study the problem of off-policy evaluation in the multi-armed bandit model with bounded rewards, and develop minimax rate-optimal procedures under three settings. First, when the behavior policy is known, we show that the Switch…
We study a novel heterogeneous multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem with a cluster structure induced by stochastic block models, influencing not only graph topology, but also reward heterogeneity. Specifically, agents are distributed on…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) model is one of the most classical models to study decision-making in an uncertain environment. In this model, a player chooses one of $K$ possible arms of a bandit machine to play at each time step, where the…