Related papers: Optimal Gradient-based Algorithms for Non-concave …
Intrinsic rewards play a central role in handling the exploration-exploitation trade-off when designing sequential decision-making algorithms, in both foundational theory and state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning. The LinUCB…
We introduce the study of fairness in multi-armed bandit problems. Our fairness definition can be interpreted as demanding that given a pool of applicants (say, for college admission or mortgages), a worse applicant is never favored over a…
We consider contextual linear bandits over networks, a class of sequential decision-making problems where learning occurs simultaneously across multiple locations and the reward distributions share structural similarities while also…
This paper addresses the problem of learning to sparsify stochastic linear bandits, where a decision-maker sequentially selects actions from a high-dimensional space subject to a sparsity constraint on the number of nonzero elements in the…
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…
While standard reinforcement learning optimizes a single reward signal, many applications require optimizing a nonlinear utility $f(J_1^\pi,\dots,J_M^\pi)$ over multiple objectives, where each $J_m^\pi$ denotes the expected discounted…
We consider the adversarial linear contextual bandit problem, where the loss vectors are selected fully adversarially and the per-round action set (i.e. the context) is drawn from a fixed distribution. Existing methods for this problem…
In this paper, we analyze the problem of online convex optimization in different settings, including different feedback types (full-information/semi-bandit/bandit/etc) in either stochastic or non-stochastic setting and different notions of…
The safe linear bandit problem (SLB) is an online approach to linear programming with unknown objective and unknown roundwise constraints, under stochastic bandit feedback of rewards and safety risks of actions. We study the tradeoffs…
Increasingly, recommender systems are tasked with improving users' long-term satisfaction. In this context, we study a content exploration task, which we formalize as a bandit problem with delayed rewards. There is an apparent trade-off in…
We consider the maximization of $x^\top \theta$ over $(x,\theta) \in \mathcal{X} \times \Theta$, with $\mathcal{X} \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ convex and $\Theta \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ an ellipsoid. This problem is fundamental in linear bandits,…
Motivated by wireless networks where interference or channel state estimates provide partial insight into throughput, we study a variant of the classical stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in which the learner has limited access to…
We study how to make decisions that minimize Bayesian regret in offline linear bandits. Prior work suggests that one must take actions with maximum lower confidence bound (LCB) on their reward. We argue that the reliance on LCB is…
The principle of optimism in the face of uncertainty is one of the most widely used and successful ideas in multi-armed bandits and reinforcement learning. However, existing optimistic algorithms (primarily UCB and its variants) often…
In many fields such as digital marketing, healthcare, finance, and robotics, it is common to have a well-tested and reliable baseline policy running in production (e.g., a recommender system). Nonetheless, the baseline policy is often…
We present a new algorithm based on an gradient ascent for a general Active Exploration bandit problem in the fixed confidence setting. This problem encompasses several well studied problems such that the Best Arm Identification or…
A matroid is a notion of independence in combinatorial optimization which is closely related to computational efficiency. In particular, it is well known that the maximum of a constrained modular function can be found greedily if and only…
Much of the literature on optimal design of bandit algorithms is based on minimization of expected regret. It is well known that designs that are optimal over certain exponential families can achieve expected regret that grows…
Submodular optimization with bandit feedback has recently been studied in a variety of contexts. In a number of real-world applications such as diversified recommender systems and data summarization, the submodular function exhibits…
By leveraging the representation power of deep neural networks, neural upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms have shown success in contextual bandits. To further balance the exploration and exploitation, we propose…