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Effective solving of constraint problems often requires choosing good or specific search heuristics. However, choosing or designing a good search heuristic is non-trivial and is often a manual process. In this paper, rather than manually…

In the stochastic linear contextual bandit setting there exist several minimax procedures for exploration with policies that are reactive to the data being acquired. In practice, there can be a significant engineering overhead to deploy…

The Exploration-Exploitation tradeoff arises in Reinforcement Learning when one cannot tell if a policy is optimal. Then, there is a constant need to explore new actions instead of exploiting past experience. In practice, it is common to…

Learning in multi-player games can model a large variety of practical scenarios, where each player seeks to optimize its own local objective function, which at the same time relies on the actions taken by others. Motivated by the frequent…

We study MNL bandits, which is a variant of the traditional multi-armed bandit problem, under risk criteria. Unlike the ordinary expected revenue, risk criteria are more general goals widely used in industries and bussiness. We design…

Bandit algorithms have garnered significant attention due to their practical applications in real-world scenarios. However, beyond simple settings such as multi-arm or linear bandits, optimal algorithms remain scarce. Notably, no optimal…

We study the linear stochastic bandit problem, relaxing the standard i.i.d. assumption on the observation noise. As an alternative to this restrictive assumption, we allow the noise terms across rounds to be sub-Gaussian but interdependent,…

This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Pure exploration in multi-armed bandits has emerged as an important framework for modeling decision-making and search under uncertainty. In modern applications, however, one is often faced with a tremendously large number of options. Even…

In the classic multi-armed bandits problem, the goal is to have a policy for dynamically operating arms that each yield stochastic rewards with unknown means. The key metric of interest is regret, defined as the gap between the expected…

We study the setting of optimizing with bandit feedback with additional prior knowledge provided to the learner in the form of an initial hint of the optimal action. We present a novel algorithm for stochastic linear bandits that uses this…

We initiate the study of multi-stage episodic reinforcement learning under adversarial corruptions in both the rewards and the transition probabilities of the underlying system extending recent results for the special case of stochastic…

Most work on sequential learning assumes a fixed set of actions that are available all the time. However, in practice, actions can consist of picking subsets of readings from sensors that may break from time to time, road segments that can…

The statistical framework of Generalized Linear Models (GLM) can be applied to sequential problems involving categorical or ordinal rewards associated, for instance, with clicks, likes or ratings. In the example of binary rewards, logistic…

We study the problem of information sharing and cooperation in Multi-Player Multi-Armed bandits. We propose the first algorithm that achieves logarithmic regret for this problem when the collision reward is unknown. Our results are based on…

Decision-making under uncertainty is a fundamental problem encountered frequently and can be formulated as a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem. In the problem, the learner interacts with an environment by choosing an action at each…

In this paper, we propose a cost-aware cascading bandits model, a new variant of multi-armed ban- dits with cascading feedback, by considering the random cost of pulling arms. In each step, the learning agent chooses an ordered list of…

Bandit algorithms solve diverse sequential decision-making problems, but are often too sample-inefficient for from-scratch personalization. To substantially reduce exploration times, latent bandit algorithms exploit cross-instance structure…

We study the problem of using causal models to improve the rate at which good interventions can be learned online in a stochastic environment. Our formalism combines multi-arm bandits and causal inference to model a novel type of bandit…

We introduce a new model of stochastic bandits with adversarial corruptions which aims to capture settings where most of the input follows a stochastic pattern but some fraction of it can be adversarially changed to trick the algorithm,…