Related papers: Minimax Off-Policy Evaluation for Multi-Armed Band…
This paper introduces the first asymptotically optimal strategy for a multi armed bandit (MAB) model under side constraints. The side constraints model situations in which bandit activations are limited by the availability of certain…
Algorithms for the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem play a central role in sequential decision-making and have been extensively explored both theoretically and numerically. While most classical approaches aim to identify the arm with the…
We address the problem of identifying the optimal policy with a fixed confidence level in a multi-armed bandit setup, when \emph{the arms are subject to linear constraints}. Unlike the standard best-arm identification problem which is well…
In this paper,we consider the restless bandit problem, which is one of the most well-studied generalizations of the celebrated stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory. However, it is known be PSPACE-Hard to approximate to…
We consider off-policy selection and learning in contextual bandits, where the learner aims to select or train a reward-maximizing policy using data collected by a fixed behavior policy. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we propose a…
In machine learning we often try to optimise a decision rule that would have worked well over a historical dataset; this is the so called empirical risk minimisation principle. In the context of learning from recommender system logs,…
We consider a multi-armed bandit setting with finitely many arms, in which each arm yields an $M$-dimensional vector reward upon selection. We assume that the reward of each dimension (a.k.a. {\em objective}) is generated independently of…
We develop asymptotically optimal policies for the multi armed bandit (MAB), problem, under a cost constraint. This model is applicable in situations where each sample (or activation) from a population (bandit) incurs a known bandit…
Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…
We study a regret minimization problem with the existence of multiple best/near-optimal arms in the multi-armed bandit setting. We consider the case when the number of arms/actions is comparable or much larger than the time horizon, and…
We consider the problem of using observational bandit feedback data from multiple heterogeneous data sources to learn a personalized decision policy that robustly generalizes across diverse target settings. To achieve this, we propose a…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the value of a target policy from samples obtained via different policies. Recently, applying OPE methods for bandit problems has garnered attention. For the theoretical guarantees of…
In budget-limited multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems, the learner's actions are costly and constrained by a fixed budget. Consequently, an optimal exploitation policy may not be to pull the optimal arm repeatedly, as is the case in other…
Decision making under uncertain environments in the maximization of expected reward while minimizing its risk is one of the ubiquitous problems in many subjects. Here, we introduce a novel problem setting in stochastic bandit optimization…
Partially observable restless multi-armed bandits have found numerous applications including in recommendation systems, communication systems, public healthcare outreach systems, and in operations research. We study multi-action partially…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits has seen rapid adoption in real-world systems, since it enables offline evaluation of new policies using only historic log data. Unfortunately, when the number of actions is large, existing…
We study the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem in the presence of side-observations across actions that occur as a result of an underlying network structure. In our model, a bipartite graph captures the relationship between…
A sensing policy for the restless multi-armed bandit problem with stationary but unknown reward distributions is proposed. The work is presented in the context of cognitive radios in which the bandit problem arises when deciding which parts…
We propose the first boosting algorithm for off-policy learning from logged bandit feedback. Unlike existing boosting methods for supervised learning, our algorithm directly optimizes an estimate of the policy's expected reward. We analyze…
We propose a new framework for designing estimators for off-policy evaluation in contextual bandits. Our approach is based on the asymptotically optimal doubly robust estimator, but we shrink the importance weights to minimize a bound on…