Related papers: Planning to Fairly Allocate: Probabilistic Fairnes…
Restless multi-armed bandits (RMAB) is a framework for allocating limited resources under uncertainty. It is an extremely useful model for monitoring beneficiaries and executing timely interventions to ensure maximum benefit in public…
Motivated by applications such as machine repair, project monitoring, and anti-poaching patrol scheduling, we study intervention planning of stochastic processes under resource constraints. This planning problem has previously been modeled…
Restless Multi-Armed Bandits (RMAB) is an apt model to represent decision-making problems in public health interventions (e.g., tuberculosis, maternal, and child care), anti-poaching planning, sensor monitoring, personalized recommendations…
When an AI system interacts with multiple users, it frequently needs to make allocation decisions. For instance, a virtual agent decides whom to pay attention to in a group setting, or a factory robot selects a worker to deliver a part.…
In restless bandits, a central agent is tasked with optimally distributing limited resources across several bandits (arms), with each arm being a Markov decision process. In this work, we generalize the traditional restless bandits problem…
In this paper,we consider the restless bandit problem, which is one of the most well-studied generalizations of the celebrated stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory. However, it is known be PSPACE-Hard to approximate to…
We propose and study Collpasing Bandits, a new restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) setting in which each arm follows a binary-state Markovian process with a special structure: when an arm is played, the state is fully observed, thus…
The Whittle index for restless bandits (two-action semi-Markov decision processes) provides an intuitively appealing optimal policy for controlling a single generic project that can be active (engaged) or passive (rested) at each decision…
Classic no-regret multi-armed bandit algorithms, including the Upper Confidence Bound (UCB), Hedge, and EXP3, are inherently unfair by design. Their unfairness stems from their objective of playing the most rewarding arm as frequently as…
In an attempt to make algorithms fair, the machine learning literature has largely focused on equalizing decisions, outcomes, or error rates across race or gender groups. To illustrate, consider a hypothetical government rideshare program…
Contextual bandit algorithms are at the core of many applications, including recommender systems, clinical trials, and optimal portfolio selection. One of the most popular problems studied in the contextual bandit literature is to maximize…
Contextual bandit algorithms have become widely used for recommendation in online systems (e.g. marketplaces, music streaming, news), where they now wield substantial influence on which items get exposed to the users. This raises questions…
We consider settings in which we wish to incentivize myopic agents (such as Airbnb landlords, who may emphasize short-term profits and property safety) to treat arriving clients fairly, in order to prevent overall discrimination against…
This paper studies a class of constrained restless multi-armed bandits (CRMAB). The constraints are in the form of time varying set of actions (set of available arms). This variation can be either stochastic or semi-deterministic. Given a…
A sensing policy for the restless multi-armed bandit problem with stationary but unknown reward distributions is proposed. The work is presented in the context of cognitive radios in which the bandit problem arises when deciding which parts…
Restless bandits are an important class of problems with applications in recommender systems, active learning, revenue management and other areas. We consider infinite-horizon discounted restless bandits with many arms where a fixed…
We propose a novel formulation of group fairness with biased feedback in the contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) setting. In the CMAB setting, a sequential decision maker must, at each time step, choose an arm to pull from a finite set of…
We study the linear contextual bandit problem where an agent has to select one candidate from a pool and each candidate belongs to a sensitive group. In this setting, candidates' rewards may not be directly comparable between groups, for…
We study a resource allocation problem with varying requests, and with resources of limited capacity shared by multiple requests. It is modeled as a set of heterogeneous Restless Multi-Armed Bandit Problems (RMABPs) connected by constraints…
In many public health settings, there is a perceived tension between allocating resources to known vulnerable areas and learning about the overall prevalence of the problem. Inspired by a door-to-door Covid-19 testing program we helped…