Related papers: Combinatorial Pure Exploration with Bottleneck Rew…
This paper presents a novel federated linear contextual bandits model, where individual clients face different $K$-armed stochastic bandits coupled through common global parameters. By leveraging the geometric structure of the linear…
Realistic environments often provide agents with very limited feedback. When the environment is initially unknown, the feedback, in the beginning, can be completely absent, and the agents may first choose to devote all their effort on…
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…
Reward-free exploration is a reinforcement learning setting studied by Jin et al. (2020), who address it by running several algorithms with regret guarantees in parallel. In our work, we instead give a more natural adaptive approach for…
We present Causal Posterior Estimation (CPE), a novel method for Bayesian inference in simulator models, i.e., models where the evaluation of the likelihood function is intractable or too computationally expensive, but where one can…
One of the bottlenecks preventing Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms (DRL) from real-world applications is how to explore the environment and collect informative transitions efficiently. The present paper describes bounded exploration,…
Many real-world functions are defined over both categorical and category-specific continuous variables and thus cannot be optimized by traditional Bayesian optimization (BO) methods. To optimize such functions, we propose a new method that…
Despite the great interest in the bandit problem, designing efficient algorithms for complex models remains challenging, as there is typically no analytical way to quantify uncertainty. In this paper, we propose Multiplier Bootstrap-based…
We study pure exploration with infinitely many bandit arms generated i.i.d. from an unknown distribution. Our goal is to efficiently select a single high quality arm whose average reward is, with probability $1-\delta$, within $\varepsilon$…
Pure exploration (aka active testing) is the fundamental task of sequentially gathering information to answer a query about a stochastic environment. Good algorithms make few mistakes and take few samples. Lower bounds (for multi-armed…
We propose a novel combinatorial stochastic-greedy bandit (SGB) algorithm for combinatorial multi-armed bandit problems when no extra information other than the joint reward of the selected set of $n$ arms at each time step $t\in [T]$ is…
In model-based solution approaches to the problem of learning in an unknown environment, exploring to learn the model parameters takes a toll on the regret. The optimal performance with respect to regret or PAC bounds is achievable, if the…
In the combinatorial semi-bandit (CSB) problem, a player selects an action from a combinatorial action set and observes feedback from the base arms included in the action. While CSB is widely applicable to combinatorial optimization…
In autonomous robotic decision-making under uncertainty, the tradeoff between exploitation and exploration of available options must be considered. If secondary information associated with options can be utilized, such decision-making…
Intrinsic rewards play a central role in handling the exploration-exploitation trade-off when designing sequential decision-making algorithms, in both foundational theory and state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning. The LinUCB…
Zero-shot reinforcement learning is necessary for extracting optimal policies in absence of concrete rewards for fast adaptation to future problem settings. Forward-backward representations (FB) have emerged as a promising method for…
We consider the problem of identifying the best arm in a multi-armed bandit model. Despite a wealth of literature in the traditional fixed budget and fixed confidence regimes of the best arm identification problem, it still remains a…
Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) has been widely adapted due to its sample efficiency. However, existing worst-case regret analysis typically requires optimistic planning, which is not realistic in general. In contrast, motivated…
We present a general method for fitting finite mixture models (FMM). Learning in a mixture model consists of finding the most likely cluster assignment for each data-point, as well as finding the parameters of the clusters themselves. In…
In a fixed-confidence pure exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits, an algorithm iteratively samples arms and should stop as early as possible and return the correct answer to a query about the arms distributions. We are…