Related papers: The Impact of Batch Learning in Stochastic Bandits
The Colonel Blotto game is a renowned resource allocation problem with a long-standing literature in game theory (almost 100 years). However, its scope of application is still restricted by the lack of studies on the incomplete-information…
We consider a linear stochastic bandit problem involving $M$ agents that can collaborate via a central server to minimize regret. A fraction $\alpha$ of these agents are adversarial and can act arbitrarily, leading to the following tension:…
We consider the contextual bandit problem on general action and context spaces, where the learner's rewards depend on their selected actions and an observable context. This generalizes the standard multi-armed bandit to the case where side…
We study a security threat to batch reinforcement learning and control where the attacker aims to poison the learned policy. The victim is a reinforcement learner / controller which first estimates the dynamics and the rewards from a batch…
We study the $K$-armed contextual dueling bandit problem, a sequential decision making setting in which the learner uses contextual information to make two decisions, but only observes \emph{preference-based feedback} suggesting that one…
Online experimentation with interference is a common challenge in modern applications such as e-commerce and adaptive clinical trials in medicine. For example, in online marketplaces, the revenue of a good depends on discounts applied to…
A contextual bandit is a popular framework for online learning to act under uncertainty. In practice, the number of actions is huge and their expected rewards are correlated. In this work, we introduce a general framework for capturing such…
Meta-learning seeks to build algorithms that rapidly learn how to solve new learning problems based on previous experience. In this paper we investigate meta-learning in the setting of stochastic linear bandit tasks. We assume that the…
The analysis of online least squares estimation is at the heart of many stochastic sequential decision making problems. We employ tools from the self-normalized processes to provide a simple and self-contained proof of a tail bound of a…
In this paper, we study both multi-armed and contextual bandit problems in censored environments. Our goal is to estimate the performance loss due to censorship in the context of classical algorithms designed for uncensored environments.…
We study a collaborative multi-agent stochastic linear bandit setting, where $N$ agents that form a network communicate locally to minimize their overall regret. In this setting, each agent has its own linear bandit problem (its own reward…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) model is one of the most classical models to study decision-making in an uncertain environment. In this model, a player chooses one of $K$ possible arms of a bandit machine to play at each time step, where the…
We study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem and design new policies that enjoy both worst-case optimality for expected regret and light-tailed risk for regret distribution. Specifically, our policy design (i) enjoys the worst-case…
We consider the problem of adversarial (non-stochastic) online learning with partial information feedback, where at each round, a decision maker selects an action from a finite set of alternatives. We develop a black-box approach for such…
We present a new algorithm for the contextual bandit learning problem, where the learner repeatedly takes one of $K$ actions in response to the observed context, and observes the reward only for that chosen action. Our method assumes access…
We study a variant of causal contextual bandits where the context is chosen based on an initial intervention chosen by the learner. At the beginning of each round, the learner selects an initial action, depending on which a stochastic…
We study the problem of model selection in bandit scenarios in the presence of nested policy classes, with the goal of obtaining simultaneous adversarial and stochastic ("best of both worlds") high-probability regret guarantees. Our…
The study of collaborative multi-agent bandits has attracted significant attention recently. In light of this, we initiate the study of a new collaborative setting, consisting of $N$ agents such that each agent is learning one of $M$…
Stochastic optimization is a widely used approach for optimization under uncertainty, where uncertain input parameters are modeled by random variables. Exact or approximation algorithms have been obtained for several fundamental problems in…
We establish a link between a class of discrete choice models and the theory of online learning and multi-armed bandits. Our contributions are: (i) sublinear regret bounds for a broad algorithmic family, encompassing Exp3 as a special case;…