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In the latent bandit problem, the learner has access to reward distributions and -- for the non-stationary variant -- transition models of the environment. The reward distributions are conditioned on the arm and unknown latent states. The…
In many platforms, user arrivals exhibit a self-reinforcing behavior: future user arrivals are likely to have preferences similar to users who were satisfied in the past. In other words, arrivals exhibit positive externalities. We study…
We introduce the functional bandit problem, where the objective is to find an arm that optimises a known functional of the unknown arm-reward distributions. These problems arise in many settings such as maximum entropy methods in natural…
This paper investigates stochastic multi-armed bandit algorithms that are robust to adversarial attacks, where an attacker can first observe the learner's action and {then} alter their reward observation. We study two cases of this model,…
We study the problem of minimising regret in two-armed bandit problems with Gaussian rewards. Our objective is to use this simple setting to illustrate that strategies based on an exploration phase (up to a stopping time) followed by…
Many important optimization problems, such as the minimum spanning tree and minimum-cost flow, can be solved optimally by a greedy method. In this work, we study a learning variant of these problems, where the model of the problem is…
A contextual bandit problem is studied in a highly non-stationary environment, which is ubiquitous in various recommender systems due to the time-varying interests of users. Two models with disjoint and hybrid payoffs are considered to…
Reinforcement learning generalizes multi-armed bandit problems with additional difficulties of a longer planning horizon and unknown transition kernel. We explore a black-box reduction from discounted infinite-horizon tabular reinforcement…
In multi-objective decision-making with hierarchical preferences, lexicographic bandits provide a natural framework for optimizing multiple objectives in a prioritized order. In this setting, a learner repeatedly selects arms and observes…
Recommender systems are a ubiquitous feature of online platforms. Increasingly, they are explicitly tasked with increasing users' long-term satisfaction. In this context, we study a content exploration task, which we formalize as a…
We study fair multi-agent multi-armed bandit learning under collision-only coordination. Agents cannot communicate explicitly during learning and observe only their own rewards and whether collisions occur when several agents access the…
In this paper, we introduce the notion of replicable policies in the context of stochastic bandits, one of the canonical problems in interactive learning. A policy in the bandit environment is called replicable if it pulls, with high…
We consider a novel multi-arm bandit (MAB) setup, where a learner needs to communicate the actions to distributed agents over erasure channels, while the rewards for the actions are directly available to the learner through external…
We consider the problem of reward maximization in the dueling bandit setup along with constraints on resource consumption. As in the classic dueling bandits, at each round the learner has to choose a pair of items from a set of $K$ items…
We study the problem of incentive-compatible online learning with bandit feedback. In this class of problems, the experts are self-interested agents who might misrepresent their preferences with the goal of being selected most often. The…
Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…
While classical formulations of multi-armed bandit problems assume that each arm's reward is independent and stationary, real-world applications often involve non-stationary environments and interdependencies between arms. In particular,…
We study the problem of information sharing and cooperation in Multi-Player Multi-Armed bandits. We propose the first algorithm that achieves logarithmic regret for this problem when the collision reward is unknown. Our results are based on…
Motivated by applications such as online labor markets we consider a variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where we have a collection of arms representing strategic agents with different performance characteristics. The…
In this paper, we study the multi-objective bandits (MOB) problem, where a learner repeatedly selects one arm to play and then receives a reward vector consisting of multiple objectives. MOB has found many real-world applications as varied…