Related papers: Can Q-learning solve Multi Armed Bantids?

We study an important variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, which takes penalization into consideration. Instead of directly maximizing cumulative expected reward, we need to balance between the total reward and…

Multi-agent inverse reinforcement learning (MIRL) can be used to learn reward functions from agents in social environments. To model realistic social dynamics, MIRL methods must account for suboptimal human reasoning and behavior.…

Traditional multi-armed bandit (MAB) formulations usually make certain assumptions about the underlying arms' distributions, such as bounds on the support or their tail behaviour. Moreover, such parametric information is usually 'baked'…

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been around for decades and employed to solve various sequential decision-making problems. These algorithms however have faced great challenges when dealing with high-dimensional environments. The…

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…

Contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms have been shown promising for maximizing cumulative rewards in sequential decision tasks such as news article recommendation systems, web page ad placement algorithms, and mobile health.…

We study a class of constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which multiple constraint specifications are not identified before training. It is challenging to identify appropriate constraint specifications due to the undefined…

Scaling issues are mundane yet irritating for practitioners of reinforcement learning. Error scales vary across domains, tasks, and stages of learning; sometimes by many orders of magnitude. This can be detrimental to learning speed and…

We study an interesting variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, called the Fair-SMAB problem, where each arm is required to be pulled for at least a given fraction of the total available rounds. We investigate the interplay…

Natural and formal languages provide an effective mechanism for humans to specify instructions and reward functions. We investigate how to generate policies via RL when reward functions are specified in a symbolic language captured by…

Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a naturalistic framing for learning through trial and error, which is appealing both because of its simplicity and effectiveness and because of its resemblance to how humans and animals acquire skills…

A recent line of research focuses on the study of the stochastic multi-armed bandits problem (MAB), in the case where temporal correlations of specific structure are imposed between the player's actions and the reward distributions of the…

We study the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem with composite and anonymous feedback. In this model, the reward of pulling an arm spreads over a period of time (we call this period as reward interval) and the player receives partial rewards…

We consider the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem, where an agent sequentially chooses actions and observes rewards for the actions it took. While the majority of algorithms try to minimize the regret, i.e., the cumulative difference between…

Deep Reinforcement Learning has been shown to be very successful in complex games, e.g. Atari or Go. These games have clearly defined rules, and hence allow simulation. In many practical applications, however, interactions with the…

Consider a requester who wishes to crowdsource a series of identical binary labeling tasks to a pool of workers so as to achieve an assured accuracy for each task, in a cost optimal way. The workers are heterogeneous with unknown but fixed…

A Markov Decision Process (MDP) is a popular model for reinforcement learning. However, its commonly used assumption of stationary dynamics and rewards is too stringent and fails to hold in adversarial, nonstationary, or multi-agent…

Restless Multi-Armed Bandits (RMABs) are a powerful framework for sequential decision-making, widely applied in resource allocation and intervention optimization challenges in public health. However, traditional RMABs assume independence…

In many real-world applications, it is hard to provide a reward signal in each step of a Reinforcement Learning (RL) process and more natural to give feedback when an episode ends. To this end, we study the recently proposed model of RL…

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…