Related papers: Smooth Sequential Optimisation with Delayed Feedba…
This paper studies a new variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandits problem where auxiliary information about the arm rewards is available in the form of control variates. In many applications like queuing and wireless networks, the arm…
We propose a model for learning with bandit feedback while accounting for deterministically evolving and unobservable states that we call Bandits with Deterministically Evolving States ($B$-$DES$). The workhorse applications of our model…
We study stage-wise conservative linear stochastic bandits: an instance of bandit optimization, which accounts for (unknown) safety constraints that appear in applications such as online advertising and medical trials. At each stage, the…
Stochastic multi-armed bandits are a sequential-decision-making framework, where, at each interaction step, the learner selects an arm and observes a stochastic reward. Within the context of best-arm identification (BAI) problems, the goal…
Multi-arm bandits are gaining popularity as they enable real-world sequential decision-making across application areas, including clinical trials, recommender systems, and online decision-making. Consequently, there is an increased desire…
Policy gradients-based reinforcement learning has proven to be a promising approach for directly optimizing non-differentiable evaluation metrics for language generation tasks. However, optimizing for a specific metric reward leads to…
In the setting of multi-armed trials, adaptive designs are a popular way to increase estimation efficiency, identify optimal treatments, or maximize rewards to individuals. Recent work has considered the case of estimating the effects of K…
We consider the distributed SGD problem, where a main node distributes gradient calculations among $n$ workers. By assigning tasks to all the workers and waiting only for the $k$ fastest ones, the main node can trade-off the algorithm's…
Thompson Sampling provides an efficient technique to introduce prior knowledge in the multi-armed bandit problem, along with providing remarkable empirical performance. In this paper, we revisit the Thompson Sampling algorithm under rewards…
Smooth functions on graphs have wide applications in manifold and semi-supervised learning. In this work, we study a bandit problem where the payoffs of arms are smooth on a graph. This framework is suitable for solving online learning…
Sequential decision making under uncertainty is studied in a mixed observability domain. The goal is to maximize the amount of information obtained on a partially observable stochastic process under constraints imposed by a fully observable…
Conducting experiments with objectives that take significant delays to materialize (e.g. conversions, add-to-cart events, etc.) is challenging. Although the classical "split sample testing" is still valid for the delayed feedback, the…
This paper investigates the problem of combinatorial multiarmed bandits with stochastic submodular (in expectation) rewards and full-bandit delayed feedback, where the delayed feedback is assumed to be composite and anonymous. In other…
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…
In the infinite-armed bandit problem, each arm's average reward is sampled from an unknown distribution, and each arm can be sampled further to obtain noisy estimates of the average reward of that arm. Prior work focuses on identifying the…
In this paper, we consider stochastic multi-armed bandits (MABs) with heavy-tailed rewards, whose $p$-th moment is bounded by a constant $\nu_{p}$ for $1<p\leq2$. First, we propose a novel robust estimator which does not require $\nu_{p}$…
Adapting to a priori unknown noise level is a very important but challenging problem in sequential decision-making as efficient exploration typically requires knowledge of the noise level, which is often loosely specified. We report…
The bias of the sample means of the arms in multi-armed bandits is an important issue in adaptive data analysis that has recently received considerable attention in the literature. Existing results relate in precise ways the sign and…
We propose the first fully-adaptive algorithm for pure exploration in linear bandits---the task to find the arm with the largest expected reward, which depends on an unknown parameter linearly. While existing methods partially or entirely…
We study a sequential resource allocation problem between a fixed number of arms. On each iteration the algorithm distributes a resource among the arms in order to maximize the expected success rate. Allocating more of the resource to a…