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Contextual bandits are canonical models for sequential decision-making under uncertainty in environments with time-varying components. In this setting, the expected reward of each bandit arm consists of the inner product of an unknown…

Myopic exploration policies such as epsilon-greedy, softmax, or Gaussian noise fail to explore efficiently in some reinforcement learning tasks and yet, they perform well in many others. In fact, in practice, they are often selected as the…

We study the problem of transfer-learning in the setting of stochastic linear bandit tasks. We consider that a low dimensional linear representation is shared across the tasks, and study the benefit of learning this representation in the…

We study reinforcement learning with linear function approximation and adversarially changing cost functions, a setup that has mostly been considered under simplifying assumptions such as full information feedback or exploratory…

In the convex optimization approach to online regret minimization, many methods have been developed to guarantee a $O(\sqrt{T})$ bound on regret for subdifferentiable convex loss functions with bounded subgradients, by using a reduction to…

Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…

We study an extension of standard bandit problem in which there are R layers of experts. Multi-layered experts make selections layer by layer and only the experts in the last layer can play arms. The goal of the learning policy is to…

An important problem in sequential decision-making under uncertainty is to use limited data to compute a safe policy, i.e., a policy that is guaranteed to perform at least as well as a given baseline strategy. In this paper, we develop and…

During training, reinforcement learning systems interact with the world without considering the safety of their actions. When deployed into the real world, such systems can be dangerous and cause harm to their surroundings. Often, dangerous…

Recently, several studies (Zhou et al., 2021a; Zhang et al., 2021b; Kim et al., 2021; Zhou and Gu, 2022) have provided variance-dependent regret bounds for linear contextual bandits, which interpolates the regret for the worst-case regime…

Policy optimization methods are popular reinforcement learning algorithms in practice. Recent works have built theoretical foundation for them by proving $\sqrt{T}$ regret bounds even when the losses are adversarial. Such bounds are tight…

In the kernelized bandit problem, a learner aims to sequentially compute the optimum of a function lying in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space given only noisy evaluations at sequentially chosen points. In particular, the learner aims to…

We propose a new concept named adaptive submodularity ratio to study the greedy policy for sequential decision making. While the greedy policy is known to perform well for a wide variety of adaptive stochastic optimization problems in…

In this paper, we propose a probabilistic game-theoretic model to study the properties of the worst-case regret of the greedy strategy under complete (Knightian) uncertainty. In a game between a decision-maker (DM) and an adversarial agent…

We study linear bandits when the underlying reward function is not linear. Existing work relies on a uniform misspecification parameter $\epsilon$ that measures the sup-norm error of the best linear approximation. This results in an…

Online learning algorithms are designed to learn even when their input is generated by an adversary. The widely-accepted formal definition of an online algorithm's ability to learn is the game-theoretic notion of regret. We argue that the…

We consider a version of the continuum armed bandit where an action induces a filtered realisation of a non-homogeneous Poisson process. Point data in the filtered sample are then revealed to the decision-maker, whose reward is the total…

This paper studies bandit problems where an agent has access to offline data that might be utilized to potentially improve the estimation of each arm's reward distribution. A major obstacle in this setting is the existence of compound…

In order for reinforcement learning techniques to be useful in real-world decision making processes, they must be able to produce robust performance from limited data. Deep policy optimization methods have achieved impressive results on…

This paper studies batched bandit learning problems for nondegenerate functions. We introduce an algorithm that solves the batched bandit problem for nondegenerate functions near-optimally. More specifically, we introduce an algorithm,…