Related papers: Generalised correlated batched bandits via the ARC…
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…
Cascading bandits is a natural and popular model that frames the task of learning to rank from Bernoulli click feedback in a bandit setting. For the case of unstructured rewards, we prove matching upper and lower bounds for the…
In this paper, we consider a new Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem where arms are nodes in an unknown and possibly changing graph, and the agent (i) initiates random walks over the graph by pulling arms, (ii) observes the random walk…
Stochastic optimal control with unknown randomness distributions has been studied for a long time, encompassing robust control, distributionally robust control, and adaptive control. We propose a new episodic Bayesian approach that…
We consider stochastic sequential learning problems where the learner can observe the \textit{average reward of several actions}. Such a setting is interesting in many applications involving monitoring and surveillance, where the set of the…
We consider the sparse contextual bandit problem where arm feature affects reward through the inner product of sparse parameters. Recent studies have developed sparsity-agnostic algorithms based on the greedy arm selection policy. However,…
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…
The staggering feats of AI systems have brought to attention the topic of AI Alignment: aligning a "superintelligent" AI agent's actions with humanity's interests. Many existing frameworks/algorithms in alignment study the problem on a…
In this paper we propose a flexible and efficient framework for handling multi-armed bandits, combining sequential Monte Carlo algorithms with hierarchical Bayesian modeling techniques. The framework naturally encompasses restless bandits,…
In this paper we consider the problem of learning the optimal policy for uncontrolled restless bandit problems. In an uncontrolled restless bandit problem, there is a finite set of arms, each of which when pulled yields a positive reward.…
Advanced regulatory control (ARC), also known as advanced PID architectures, is a simple and robust way of controlling processes with changing and possibly conflicting constraints, where it previously was believed - at least in academia -…
Statistical uncertainties are rarely incorporated in machine learning algorithms, especially for anomaly detection. Here we present the Bayesian Anomaly Detection And Classification (BADAC) formalism, which provides a unified statistical…
We consider Bayesian optimization in settings where observations can be adversarially biased, for example by an uncontrolled hidden confounder. Our first contribution is a reduction of the confounded setting to the dueling bandit model.…
The scalable adaptive cubic regularization method ($\mathrm{ARC_{q}K}$: Dussault et al. in Math. Program. Ser. A 207(1-2): 191-225, 2024) has been recently proposed for unconstrained optimization. It has excellent convergence properties,…
We consider the stochastic linear (multi-armed) contextual bandit problem with the possibility of hidden simple multi-armed bandit structure in which the rewards are independent of the contextual information. Algorithms that are designed…
The $K$-armed dueling bandit problem, where the feedback is in the form of noisy pairwise comparisons, has been widely studied. Previous works have only focused on the sequential setting where the policy adapts after every comparison.…
We study the problem of selecting a subset from a large action space shared by a family of bandits. In many natural situations, while the nominal set of actions is large, actions are highly correlated: many yield similar rewards across…
Multi-armed bandits (MAB) are commonly used in sequential online decision-making when the reward of each decision is an unknown random variable. In practice however, the typical goal of maximizing total reward may be less important than…
The combinatorial stochastic semi-bandit problem is an extension of the classical multi-armed bandit problem in which an algorithm pulls more than one arm at each stage and the rewards of all pulled arms are revealed. One difference with…
In many real-world applications, it is hard to provide a reward signal in each step of a Reinforcement Learning (RL) process and more natural to give feedback when an episode ends. To this end, we study the recently proposed model of RL…