Related papers: Continuous Time Bandits With Sampling Costs
We study regret minimization in a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting and establish a fundamental trade-off between the regret suffered under an algorithm, and its statistical robustness. Considering broad classes of underlying arms'…
We consider the classical stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with a constraint that limits the total cost incurred by switching between actions to be no larger than a given switching budget. For this problem, we prove matching upper and…
We introduce a novel extension of the canonical multi-armed bandit problem that incorporates an additional strategic innovation: abstention. In this enhanced framework, the agent is not only tasked with selecting an arm at each time step,…
Non-stationary multi-armed bandits (NS-MABs) model sequential decision-making problems in which the expected rewards of a set of actions, a.k.a.~arms, evolve over time. In this paper, we fill a gap in the literature by providing a novel…
The regret lower bound of Lai and Robbins (1985), the gold standard for checking optimality of bandit algorithms, considers arm size fixed as sample size goes to infinity. We show that when arm size increases polynomially with sample size,…
Thompson Sampling is one of the oldest heuristics for multi-armed bandit problems. It is a randomized algorithm based on Bayesian ideas, and has recently generated significant interest after several studies demonstrated it to have better…
Regret minimization in streaming multi-armed bandits (MABs) has been studied extensively in recent years. In the single-pass setting with $K$ arms and $T$ trials, a regret lower bound of $\Omega(T^{2/3})$ has been proved for any algorithm…
In the classic Bayesian restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problem, there are $N$ arms, with rewards on all arms evolving at each time as Markov chains with known parameters. A player seeks to activate $K \geq 1$ arms at each time in order…
We study a decentralized multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem in which multiple clients are connected by time dependent random graphs provided by an environment. The reward distributions of each arm vary across clients and rewards are…
Restless bandit problems assume time-varying reward distributions of the arms, which adds flexibility to the model but makes the analysis more challenging. We study learning algorithms over the unknown reward distributions and prove a…
We investigate a natural but surprisingly unstudied approach to the multi-armed bandit problem under safety risk constraints. Each arm is associated with an unknown law on safety risks and rewards, and the learner's goal is to maximise…
We study finite-armed semiparametric bandits, where each arm's reward combines a linear component with an unknown, potentially adversarial shift. This model strictly generalizes classical linear bandits and reflects complexities common in…
We propose $\tt RandUCB$, a bandit strategy that builds on theoretically derived confidence intervals similar to upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms, but akin to Thompson sampling (TS), it uses randomization to trade off exploration and…
Stochastic Rank-One Bandits (Katarya et al, (2017a,b)) are a simple framework for regret minimization problems over rank-one matrices of arms. The initially proposed algorithms are proved to have logarithmic regret, but do not match the…
Many sequential decision-making tasks require choosing at each decision step the right action out of the vast set of possibilities by extracting actionable intelligence from high-dimensional data streams. Most of the times, the…
We consider stochastic multi-armed bandit problems where the expected reward is a Lipschitz function of the arm, and where the set of arms is either discrete or continuous. For discrete Lipschitz bandits, we derive asymptotic problem…
The Greedy algorithm is the simplest heuristic in sequential decision problem that carelessly takes the locally optimal choice at each round, disregarding any advantages of exploring and/or information gathering. Theoretically, it is known…
We study the Linear Contextual Bandit problem in the hybrid reward setting. In this setting every arm's reward model contains arm specific parameters in addition to parameters shared across the reward models of all the arms. We can reduce…
In this paper, we study sequential decision-making for maximizing the Sharpe ratio (SR) in a stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) setting. Unlike standard bandit formulations that maximize cumulative reward, SR optimization requires…
We study \emph{multi-armed bandits} (MABs) augmented with \emph{best-action queries}, in which the learner may additionally query an oracle that reveals the best arm in the current round. This setting was recently characterized by Russo et…