Related papers: No-Regret Algorithms for Time-Varying Bayesian Opt…
This paper analyses the problem of Gaussian process (GP) bandits with deterministic observations. The analysis uses a branch and bound algorithm that is related to the UCB algorithm of (Srinivas et al., 2010). For GPs with Gaussian…
Gaussian process upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) is a theoretically promising approach for black-box optimization; however, the confidence parameter $\beta$ is considerably large in the theorem and chosen heuristically in practice. Then,…
We study the adversarial kernel bandit problem, in which the loss at each round is induced by an arbitrary bounded element of a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). We propose an exponential-weights algorithm built on a regularized…
We aim to optimize a black-box function $f:\mathcal{X} \mapsto \mathbb{R}$ under the assumption that $f$ is H\"older smooth and has bounded norm in the RKHS associated with a given kernel $K$. This problem is known to have an agnostic…
This paper explores the problem of path planning under uncertainty. Specifically, we consider online receding horizon based planners that need to operate in a latent environment where the latent information can be modeled via Gaussian…
In this paper, we consider the problem of black-box optimization with noisy feedback revealed in batches, where the unknown function to optimize has a bounded norm in some Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). We refer to this as the…
We consider black box optimization of an unknown function in the nonparametric Gaussian process setting when the noise in the observed function values can be heavy tailed. This is in contrast to existing literature that typically assumes…
The expected improvement (EI) algorithm is one of the most popular strategies for optimization under uncertainty due to its simplicity and efficiency. Despite its popularity, the theoretical aspects of this algorithm have not been properly…
I introduce and analyse an anytime version of the Optimally Confident UCB (OCUCB) algorithm designed for minimising the cumulative regret in finite-armed stochastic bandits with subgaussian noise. The new algorithm is simple, intuitive (in…
We consider the problem of optimising functions in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) of a Mat\'ern kernel with smoothness parameter $\nu$ over the domain $[0,1]^d$ under noisy bandit feedback. Our contribution, the $\pi$-GP-UCB…
Bayesian Optimization is critically vulnerable to extreme outliers. Existing provably robust methods typically assume a bounded cumulative corruption budget, which makes them defenseless against even a single corruption of sufficient…
Ensuring safety is a key aspect in sequential decision making problems, such as robotics or process control. The complexity of the underlying systems often makes finding the optimal decision challenging, especially when the safety-critical…
We develop a general theory to optimize the frequentist regret for sequential learning problems, where efficient bandit and reinforcement learning algorithms can be derived from unified Bayesian principles. We propose a novel optimization…
We tackle the problem of online reward maximisation over a large finite set of actions described by their contexts. We focus on the case when the number of actions is too big to sample all of them even once. However we assume that we have…
In this paper, we study the problem of Gaussian process (GP) bandits under relaxed optimization criteria stating that any function value above a certain threshold is "good enough". On the theoretical side, we study various {\em lenient…
Bayesian optimization (BO) with Gaussian process (GP) surrogate models is a powerful black-box optimization method. Acquisition functions are a critical part of a BO algorithm as they determine how the new samples are selected. Some of the…
Time-Varying Bayesian Optimization (TVBO) is the go-to framework for optimizing a time-varying black-box objective function that may be noisy and expensive to evaluate, but its excellent empirical performance remains to be understood…
We study a widely used Bayesian optimization method, Gaussian process Thompson sampling (GP-TS), under the assumption that the objective function is a sample path from a GP. Compared with the GP upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) with…
We propose a simple model selection approach for algorithms in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. As opposed to prior work that (implicitly) assumes knowledge of the optimal regret, we only require that each base…
In the bandits with knapsacks framework (BwK) the learner has $m$ resource-consumption (packing) constraints. We focus on the generalization of BwK in which the learner has a set of general long-term constraints. The goal of the learner is…