Related papers: Pure Exploration with Structured Preference Feedba…
We consider the query recommendation problem in closed loop interactive learning settings like online information gathering and exploratory analytics. The problem can be naturally modelled using the Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) framework with…
This paper considers the optimal adaptive allocation of measurement effort for identifying the best among a finite set of options or designs. An experimenter sequentially chooses designs to measure and observes noisy signals of their…
The celebrated multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory models the basic trade-off between exploration, or learning about the state of a system, and exploitation, or utilizing the system. In this paper we study the variant of the…
We consider the problem of learning an unknown subset $N_\text{target}$ of a domain in an online setting. In each round $t$, the learner predicts a set of items ${N}_t$ and receives one of two types of feedback, each with equal probability:…
We study the Combinatorial Pure Exploration problem with Continuous and Separable reward functions (CPE-CS) in the stochastic multi-armed bandit setting. In a CPE-CS instance, we are given several stochastic arms with unknown distributions,…
We give a near-optimal sample-pass trade-off for pure exploration in multi-armed bandits (MABs) via multi-pass streaming algorithms: any streaming algorithm with sublinear memory that uses the optimal sample complexity of…
In this paper, we study Contextual Unsupervised Sequential Selection (USS), a new variant of the stochastic contextual bandits problem where the loss of an arm cannot be inferred from the observed feedback. In our setup, arms are associated…
The best arm identification problem (BEST-1-ARM) is the most basic pure exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits. The problem has a long history and attracted significant attention for the last decade. However, we do not yet…
We study the problem of clustering a set of items based on bandit feedback. Each of the $n$ items is characterized by a feature vector, with a possibly large dimension $d$. The items are partitioned into two unknown groups such that items…
We consider Bayesian optimization of expensive-to-evaluate experiments that generate vector-valued outcomes over which a decision-maker (DM) has preferences. These preferences are encoded by a utility function that is not known in closed…
In the Best-$k$-Arm problem, we are given $n$ stochastic bandit arms, each associated with an unknown reward distribution. We are required to identify the $k$ arms with the largest means by taking as few samples as possible. In this paper,…
We consider multi-armed bandit problems in social groups wherein each individual has bounded memory and shares the common goal of learning the best arm/option. We say an individual learns the best option if eventually (as $t \to \infty$) it…
Motivated by modern applications, such as online advertisement and recommender systems, we study the top-$k$ extreme contextual bandits problem, where the total number of arms can be enormous, and the learner is allowed to select $k$ arms…
This paper considers the problem of online clustering with bandit feedback. A set of arms (or items) can be partitioned into various groups that are unknown. Within each group, the observations associated to each of the arms follow the same…
We consider the classic problem of $(\epsilon,\delta)$-PAC learning a best arm where the goal is to identify with confidence $1-\delta$ an arm whose mean is an $\epsilon$-approximation to that of the highest mean arm in a multi-armed bandit…
Various tasks in decision making and decision support systems require selecting a preferred subset of a given set of items. Here we focus on problems where the individual items are described using a set of characterizing attributes, and a…
We study exploration in Multi-Armed Bandits in a setting where $k$ players collaborate in order to identify an $\epsilon$-optimal arm. Our motivation comes from recent employment of bandit algorithms in computationally intensive,…
We consider an online model for recommendation systems, with each user being recommended an item at each time-step and providing 'like' or 'dislike' feedback. A latent variable model specifies the user preferences: both users and items are…
In this paper, we investigate the impact of diverse user preference on learning under the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework. We aim to show that when the user preferences are sufficiently diverse and each arm can be optimal for…
The question of selecting the "best" amongst different choices is a common problem in statistics. In drug development, our motivating setting, the question becomes, for example: what is the dose that gives me a pre-specified risk of…