Related papers: Hierarchical Bayesian Bandits
We learn multiple hypotheses for related tasks under a latent hierarchical relationship between tasks. We exploit the intuition that for domain adaptation, we wish to share classifier structure, but for multitask learning, we wish to share…
We learn multiple hypotheses for related tasks under a latent hierarchical relationship between tasks. We exploit the intuition that for domain adaptation, we wish to share classifier structure, but for multitask learning, we wish to share…
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…
This paper considers the use of a simple posterior sampling algorithm to balance between exploration and exploitation when learning to optimize actions such as in multi-armed bandit problems. The algorithm, also known as Thompson Sampling,…
Contextual bandits are a form of multi-armed bandit in which the agent has access to predictive side information (known as the context) for each arm at each time step, and have been used to model personalized news recommendation, ad…
Most bandit algorithm designs are purely theoretical. Therefore, they have strong regret guarantees, but also are often too conservative in practice. In this work, we pioneer the idea of algorithm design by minimizing the empirical Bayes…
Performance of machine learning algorithms depends critically on identifying a good set of hyperparameters. While recent approaches use Bayesian optimization to adaptively select configurations, we focus on speeding up random search through…
Common statistical practice has shown that the full power of Bayesian methods is not realized until hierarchical priors are used, as these allow for greater "robustness" and the ability to "share statistical strength." Yet it is an ongoing…
Reinforcement learning studies how to balance exploration and exploitation in real-world systems, optimizing interactions with the world while simultaneously learning how the world operates. One general class of algorithms for such learning…
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…
Originally motivated by default risk management applications, this paper investigates a novel problem, referred to as the profitable bandit problem here. At each step, an agent chooses a subset of the K possible actions. For each action…
This paper tackles a multi-agent bandit setting where $M$ agents cooperate together to solve the same instance of a $K$-armed stochastic bandit problem. The agents are \textit{heterogeneous}: each agent has limited access to a local subset…
Meta-learning is characterized by its ability to learn how to learn, enabling the adaptation of learning strategies across different tasks. Recent research introduced the Meta-Thompson Sampling (Meta-TS), which meta-learns an unknown prior…
Motivated by the pressing need for efficient optimization in online recommender systems, we revisit the cascading bandit model proposed by Kveton et al. (2015). While Thompson sampling (TS) algorithms have been shown to be empirically…
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 $M$…
We study the problem of online multi-task learning where the tasks are performed within similar but not necessarily identical multi-armed bandit environments. In particular, we study how a learner can improve its overall performance across…
Fully Bayesian approaches to sequential decision-making assume that problem parameters are generated from a known prior. In practice, such information is often lacking. This problem is exacerbated in setups with partial information, where a…
We address the problem of online sequential decision making, i.e., balancing the trade-off between exploiting the current knowledge to maximize immediate performance and exploring the new information to gain long-term benefits using the…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a classical learning task that exemplifies the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. However, standard formulations do not take into account {\em risk}. In online decision making systems, risk is a…
Online model selection in Bayesian bandits raises a fundamental exploration challenge: When an environment instance is sampled from a prior distribution, how can we design an adaptive strategy that explores multiple bandit learners and…