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Many settings involve sequential decision-making where a set of actions can be chosen at each time step, each action provides a stochastic reward, and the distribution for the reward of each action is initially unknown. However, frequent…

Reinforcement learning is an attractive approach to learn good resource allocation and scheduling policies based on data when the system model is unknown. However, the cumulative regret of most RL algorithms scales as $\tilde O(\mathsf{S}…

Reinforcement learning algorithms are usually stated without theoretical guarantees regarding their performance. Recently, Jin, Yang, Wang, and Jordan (COLT 2020) showed a polynomial-time reinforcement learning algorithm (namely, LSVI-UCB)…

We consider the query recommendation problem in closed loop interactive learning settings like online information gathering and exploratory analytics. The problem can be naturally modelled using the Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) framework with…

Recent developments in digital platforms have highlighted the prevalence of open systems, where agents can arrive and depart over time. While bandit learning in open systems has recently received initial attention, existing work imposes…

By leveraging the representation power of deep neural networks, neural upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms have shown success in contextual bandits. To further balance the exploration and exploitation, we propose…

Due to the broad range of applications of stochastic multi-armed bandit model, understanding the effects of adversarial attacks and designing bandit algorithms robust to attacks are essential for the safe applications of this model. In this…

We consider the infinitely many-armed bandit problem with rotting rewards, where the mean reward of an arm decreases at each pull of the arm according to an arbitrary trend with maximum rotting rate $\varrho=o(1)$. We show that this…

We study the distribution of regret in stochastic multi-armed bandits and episodic reinforcement learning through a unified framework. We formalize a distributional regret bound as a probabilistic guarantee that holds uniformly over all…

Safety is a desirable property that can immensely increase the applicability of learning algorithms in real-world decision-making problems. It is much easier for a company to deploy an algorithm that is safe, i.e., guaranteed to perform at…

We study the challenging exploration incentive problem in both bandit and reinforcement learning, where the rewards are scale-free and potentially unbounded, driven by real-world scenarios and differing from existing work. Past works in…

We study online learning in unknown Markov games, a problem that arises in episodic multi-agent reinforcement learning where the actions of the opponents are unobservable. We show that in this challenging setting, achieving sublinear regret…

This paper addresses an important class of restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problems that finds broad application in operations research, stochastic optimization, and reinforcement learning. There are $N$ independent Markov processes that…

We consider a variant of the multi-armed bandit model, which we call multi-armed bandit problem with known trend, where the gambler knows the shape of the reward function of each arm but not its distribution. This new problem is motivated…

We study the Linear Contextual Bandit problem in the hybrid reward setting. In this setting every arm's reward model contains arm specific parameters in addition to parameters shared across the reward models of all the arms. We can reduce…

Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the strategy deployed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. Further, often we have only partial information on the state of the system. We study the…

We study a variant of the classical multi-armed bandit problem (MABP) which we call as Multi-Armed Bandits with dependent arms. More specifically, multiple arms are grouped together to form a cluster, and the reward distributions of arms…

Motivated by the fact that humans like some level of unpredictability or novelty, and might therefore get quickly bored when interacting with a stationary policy, we introduce a novel non-stationary bandit problem, where the expected reward…

In retail, there are predictable yet dramatic time-dependent patterns in customer behavior, such as periodic changes in the number of visitors, or increases in customers just before major holidays. The current paradigm of multi-armed bandit…

In this paper, we study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with graph feedback. Motivated by the clinical trials and recommendation problem, we assume that two arms are connected if and only if they are similar (i.e., their means are…