Related papers: Pure Exploration in Kernel and Neural Bandits
We study the problem of incentivizing exploration for myopic users in linear bandits, where the users tend to exploit arm with the highest predicted reward instead of exploring. In order to maximize the long-term reward, the system offers…
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 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 $\varepsilon$…
We study the linear bandit problem that accounts for partially observable features. Without proper handling, unobserved features can lead to linear regret in the decision horizon $T$, as their influence on rewards is unknown. To tackle this…
We study a generalization of the problem of online learning in adversarial linear contextual bandits by incorporating loss functions that belong to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, which allows for a more flexible modeling of complex…
Real-world contextual bandit problems with complex reward models are often tackled with iteratively trained models, such as boosting trees. However, it is difficult to directly apply simple and effective exploration strategies--such as…
The infamous exploration-exploitation dilemma is one of the oldest and most important problems in reinforcement learning (RL). Deliberate and effective exploration is necessary for RL agents to succeed in most environments. However, until…
We study reward maximisation in a wide class of structured stochastic multi-armed bandit problems, where the mean rewards of arms satisfy some given structural constraints, e.g. linear, unimodal, sparse, etc. Our aim is to develop methods…
Bandit problems with linear or concave reward have been extensively studied, but relatively few works have studied bandits with non-concave reward. This work considers a large family of bandit problems where the unknown underlying reward…
Standard approaches to decision-making under uncertainty focus on sequential exploration of the space of decisions. However, \textit{simultaneously} proposing a batch of decisions, which leverages available resources for parallel…
Combinatorial optimization is one of the fundamental research fields that has been extensively studied in theoretical computer science and operations research. When developing an algorithm for combinatorial optimization, it is commonly…
We propose a bandit algorithm that explores purely by randomizing its past observations. In particular, the sufficient optimism in the mean reward estimates is achieved by exploiting the variance in the past observed rewards. We name the…
Nonlinear kernels can be approximated using finite-dimensional feature maps for efficient risk minimization. Due to the inherent trade-off between the dimension of the (mapped) feature space and the approximation accuracy, the key problem…
In continuum-armed bandit problems where the underlying function resides in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), namely, the kernelised bandit problems, an important open problem remains of how well learning algorithms can adapt if…
This paper proposes near-optimal algorithms for the pure-exploration linear bandit problem in the fixed confidence and fixed budget settings. Leveraging ideas from the theory of suprema of empirical processes, we provide an algorithm whose…
We tackle the communication efficiency challenge of learning kernelized contextual bandits in a distributed setting. Despite the recent advances in communication-efficient distributed bandit learning, existing solutions are restricted to…
We study the problem of infrequent exploration in linear bandits, addressing a significant yet overlooked gap between fully adaptive exploratory methods (e.g., UCB and Thompson Sampling), which explore potentially at every time step, and…
There are two variants of the classical multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem that have received considerable attention from machine learning researchers in recent years: contextual bandits and simple regret minimization. Contextual bandits are…
Causal knowledge can be used to support decision-making problems. This has been recognized in the causal bandits literature, where a causal (multi-armed) bandit is characterized by a causal graphical model and a target variable. The arms…
In this paper, we study the non-asymptotic sample complexity for the pure exploration problem in contextual bandits and tabular reinforcement learning (RL): identifying an epsilon-optimal policy from a set of policies with high probability.…