Related papers: Reinforcement Learning for Finite-Horizon Restless…
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 a strategic variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, which we coin the strategic click-bandit. This model is motivated by applications in online recommendation where the choice of recommended items depends on both the…
Experimentation with interference poses a significant challenge in contemporary online platforms. Prior research on experimentation with interference has concentrated on the final output of a policy. The cumulative performance, while…
A standard assumption adopted in the multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework is that the mean rewards are constant over time. This assumption can be restrictive in the business world as decision-makers often face an evolving environment where…
Restless Multi-Armed Bandits (RMABs) are powerful models for decision-making under uncertainty, yet classical formulations typically assume fixed dynamics, an assumption often violated in nonstationary environments. We introduce MARBLE…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a classical online optimization model for the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. The traditional MAB is concerned with finding the arm that minimizes the mean cost. However, minimizing the mean…
Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithms are a widely-used class of sequential algorithms for the $K$-armed bandit problem. Despite extensive research over the past decades aimed at understanding their asymptotic and (near) minimax…
In many application domains (e.g., recommender systems, intelligent tutoring systems), the rewards associated to the actions tend to decrease over time. This decay is either caused by the actions executed in the past (e.g., a user may get…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems are widely studied in fields of operations research, stochastic optimization, and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we consider the classical MAB model with heavy-tailed reward distributions and…
We study a general multi-dueling bandit problem, where an agent compares multiple options simultaneously and aims to minimize the regret due to selecting suboptimal arms. This setting generalizes the traditional two-dueling bandit problem…
We consider a multi-armed bandit framework where the rewards obtained by pulling different arms are correlated. We develop a unified approach to leverage these reward correlations and present fundamental generalizations of classic bandit…
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…
The Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) framework highlights the tension between acquiring new knowledge (Exploration) and leveraging available knowledge (Exploitation). In the classical MAB problem, a decision maker must choose an arm at each time…
We consider a variant of the classic multi-armed bandit problem where the expected reward of each arm is a function of an unknown parameter. The arms are divided into different groups, each of which has a common parameter. Therefore, when…
In a typical stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, the objective is often to maximize the expected sum of rewards over some time horizon $T$. While the choice of a strategy that accomplishes that is optimal with no additional information,…
We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting and study the problem of constrained regret minimization over a given time horizon. Each arm is associated with an unknown, possibly multi-dimensional distribution, and the merit of an arm…
We study the reinforcement learning problem in the setting of finite-horizon episodic Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with $S$ states, $A$ actions, and episode length $H$. We propose a model-free algorithm UCB-Advantage and prove that it…
One of the key drivers of complexity in the classical (stochastic) multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is the difference between mean rewards in the top two arms, also known as the instance gap. The celebrated Upper Confidence Bound (UCB)…
We study the multi-player stochastic multiarmed bandit (MAB) problem in an abruptly changing environment. We consider a collision model in which a player receives reward at an arm if it is the only player to select the arm. We design two…
We study replicable algorithms for stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB) and linear bandits with UCB (Upper Confidence Bound) based exploration. A bandit algorithm is $\rho$-replicable if two executions using shared internal randomness but…