Related papers: A Bit Better? Quantifying Information for Bandit L…

Adaptive experiments are used extensively in online platforms, healthcare and biotechnology, and a variety of other settings. In many of these applications, the main goal is not to precisely estimate a treatment effect, but to demonstrate…

Bandit convex optimization (BCO) is a fundamental online learning framework with partial feedback, where the learner observes only the loss incurred at the chosen decision point in each round. In this work, we investigate whether optimistic…

The dueling bandit problem, an essential variation of the traditional multi-armed bandit problem, has become significantly prominent recently due to its broad applications in online advertising, recommendation systems, information…

Building on the view of machine learning as search, we demonstrate the necessity of bias in learning, quantifying the role of bias (measured relative to a collection of possible datasets, or more generally, information resources) in…

We consider the classic online learning and stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems, when at each step, the online policy can probe and find out which of a small number ($k$) of choices has better reward (or loss) before making its…

This paper introduces a general multi-agent bandit model in which each agent is facing a finite set of arms and may communicate with other agents through a central controller in order to identify, in pure exploration, or play, in regret…

We consider contextual bandit learning under distribution shift when reward vectors are ordered according to a given preference cone. We propose an adaptive-discretization and optimistic elimination based policy that self-tunes to the…

Contextual bandit algorithms -- a class of multi-armed bandit algorithms that exploit the contextual information -- have been shown to be effective in solving sequential decision making problems under uncertainty. A common assumption…

In multi-armed bandits, the most-explored arms are the most informative, while reward maximization typically pulls only the best arm. We study the tradeoff between identifying arm means accurately and accumulating reward, and present an…

Optimizing an interactive system against a predefined online metric is particularly challenging, when the metric is computed from user feedback such as clicks and payments. The key challenge is the counterfactual nature: in the case of Web…

Bandit learning has been an increasingly popular design choice for recommender system. Despite the strong interest in bandit learning from the community, there remains multiple bottlenecks that prevent many bandit learning approaches from…

Contextual bandit algorithms are commonly used in digital health to recommend personalized treatments. However, to ensure the effectiveness of the treatments, patients are often requested to take actions that have no immediate benefit to…

Bandits with covariates, a.k.a. contextual bandits, address situations where optimal actions (or arms) at a given time $t$, depend on a context $x_t$, e.g., a new patient's medical history, a consumer's past purchases. While it is…

We consider partially-specified optimization problems where the goal is to actively, but efficiently, acquire missing information about the problem in order to solve it. An algorithm designer wishes to solve a linear program (LP), $\max…

In recent years the information asymmetric Lipschitz bandits In this paper we studied the Lipschitz bandit problem applied to the multiplayer information asymmetric problem studied in \cite{chang2022online, chang2023optimal}. More…

Regret bounds in online learning compare the player's performance to $L^*$, the optimal performance in hindsight with a fixed strategy. Typically such bounds scale with the square root of the time horizon $T$. The more refined concept of…

We address the problem of online sequential decision making, i.e., balancing the trade-off between exploiting the current knowledge to maximize immediate performance and exploring the new information to gain long-term benefits using the…

Determining what experience to generate to best facilitate learning (i.e. exploration) is one of the distinguishing features and open challenges in reinforcement learning. The advent of distributed agents that interact with parallel…

This work considers a repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal can only interact with her environment through the agent. The principal and the agent have misaligned objectives and the choice of action is only left to the…

Efficient methods to evaluate new algorithms are critical for improving interactive bandit and reinforcement learning systems such as recommendation systems. A/B tests are reliable, but are time- and money-consuming, and entail a risk of…