Related papers: Optimal Thompson Sampling strategies for support-a…
Non-stationarity is ubiquitous in human behavior and addressing it in the contextual bandits is challenging. Several works have addressed the problem by investigating semi-parametric contextual bandits and warned that ignoring…
I study adversarial attacks against stochastic bandit algorithms. At each round, the learner chooses an arm, and a stochastic reward is generated. The adversary strategically adds corruption to the reward, and the learner is only able to…
Thompson sampling has become a ubiquitous approach to online decision problems with bandit feedback. The key algorithmic task for Thompson sampling is drawing a sample from the posterior of the optimal action. We propose an alternative arm…
We address the problem of regret minimization in logistic contextual bandits, where a learner decides among sequential actions or arms given their respective contexts to maximize binary rewards. Using a fast inference procedure with…
This paper studies active learning in the context of robust statistics. Specifically, we propose a variant of the Best Arm Identification problem for \emph{contaminated bandits}, where each arm pull has probability $\varepsilon$ of…
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 the best-arm identification problem in multi-armed bandits with stochastic, potentially private rewards, when the goal is to identify the arm with the highest quantile at a fixed, prescribed level. First, we propose a (non-private)…
Thompson sampling, a Bayesian method for balancing exploration and exploitation in bandit problems, has theoretical guarantees and exhibits strong empirical performance in many domains. Traditional Thompson sampling, however, assumes…
We consider a combinatorial multi-armed bandit problem for maximum value reward function under maximum value and index feedback. This is a new feedback structure that lies in between commonly studied semi-bandit and full-bandit feedback…
We consider a novel stochastic multi-armed bandit setting, where playing an arm makes it unavailable for a fixed number of time slots thereafter. This models situations where reusing an arm too often is undesirable (e.g. making the same…
We consider a multi-armed bandit setting in which each arm has a public and a private reward distribution. An observer expects an agent to follow Thompson Sampling according to the public rewards, however, the deceptive agent aims to…
We study the problem of identifying the best arm in a stochastic multi-armed bandit game. Given a set of $n$ arms indexed from $1$ to $n$, each arm $i$ is associated with an unknown reward distribution supported on $[0,1]$ with mean…
Thompson Sampling has generated significant interest due to its better empirical performance than upper confidence bound based algorithms. In this paper, we study Thompson Sampling based algorithm for Unsupervised Sequential Selection (USS)…
For the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem from a constrained model that generalizes the classical one, we show that an asymptotic optimality is achievable by a simple strategy extended from the $\epsilon_t$-greedy strategy. We…
Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) is a prominent risk measure that is being used extensively in various domains. We develop a new formula for the gradient of the CVaR in the form of a conditional expectation. Based on this formula, we…
We study the problem of best-arm identification with fixed confidence in stochastic linear bandits. The objective is to identify the best arm with a given level of certainty while minimizing the sampling budget. We devise a simple algorithm…
Thompson sampling for multi-armed bandit problems is known to enjoy favorable performance in both theory and practice. However, it suffers from a significant limitation computationally, arising from the need for samples from posterior…
We give a complete characterization of the complexity of best-arm identification in one-parameter bandit problems. We prove a new, tight lower bound on the sample complexity. We propose the `Track-and-Stop' strategy, which we prove to be…
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…
The multi-armed bandit problem forms the foundation for solving a wide range of on-line stochastic optimization problems through a simple, yet effective mechanism. One simply casts the problem as a gambler that repeatedly pulls one out of N…