Related papers: Gaussian Imagination in Bandit Learning

We study the problem of online learning in contextual bandit problems where the loss function is assumed to belong to a known parametric function class. We propose a new analytic framework for this setting that bridges the Bayesian theory…

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…

We consider a special case of bandit problems, named batched bandits, in which an agent observes batches of responses over a certain time period. Unlike previous work, we consider a more practically relevant batch-centric scenario of batch…

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…

We develop a meta-learning framework for simple regret minimization in bandits. In this framework, a learning agent interacts with a sequence of bandit tasks, which are sampled i.i.d.\ from an unknown prior distribution, and learns its…

The multi-armed bandit(MAB) is a classical sequential decision problem. Most work requires assumptions about the reward distribution (e.g., bounded), while practitioners may have difficulty obtaining information about these distributions to…

In the latent bandit problem, the learner has access to reward distributions and -- for the non-stationary variant -- transition models of the environment. The reward distributions are conditioned on the arm and unknown latent states. The…

Stochastic linear bandits are a fundamental model for sequential decision making, where an agent selects a vector-valued action and receives a noisy reward with expected value given by an unknown linear function. Although well studied in…

We study a bandit problem where observations from each arm have an exponential family distribution and different arms are assigned independent conjugate priors. At each of n stages, one arm is to be selected based on past observations. The…

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 introduce the factored bandits model, which is a framework for learning with limited (bandit) feedback, where actions can be decomposed into a Cartesian product of atomic actions. Factored bandits incorporate rank-1 bandits as a special…

Information-theoretic Bayesian regret bounds of Russo and Van Roy capture the dependence of regret on prior uncertainty. However, this dependence is through entropy, which can become arbitrarily large as the number of actions increases. We…

We develop a general theory to optimize the frequentist regret for sequential learning problems, where efficient bandit and reinforcement learning algorithms can be derived from unified Bayesian principles. We propose a novel optimization…

Adapting to a priori unknown noise level is a very important but challenging problem in sequential decision-making as efficient exploration typically requires knowledge of the noise level, which is often loosely specified. We report…

In this paper, we study the problem of Gaussian process (GP) bandits under relaxed optimization criteria stating that any function value above a certain threshold is "good enough". On the theoretical side, we study various {\em lenient…

We consider a continuous time two-armed bandit problem in which incomes are described by Poissonian processes. We develop Bayesian approach with arbitrary prior distribution. We present two versions of recursive equation for determination…

In the infinite-armed bandit problem, each arm's average reward is sampled from an unknown distribution, and each arm can be sampled further to obtain noisy estimates of the average reward of that arm. Prior work focuses on identifying the…

We propose ${\tt AdaTS}$, a Thompson sampling algorithm that adapts sequentially to bandit tasks that it interacts with. The key idea in ${\tt AdaTS}$ is to adapt to an unknown task prior distribution by maintaining a distribution over its…

We investigate stochastic combinatorial semi-bandits, where the entire joint distribution of outcomes impacts the complexity of the problem instance (unlike in the standard bandits). Typical distributions considered depend on specific…

We consider the combinatorial volatile Gaussian process (GP) semi-bandit problem. Each round, an agent is provided a set of available base arms and must select a subset of them to maximize the long-term cumulative reward. We study the…