Related papers: Gaussian Imagination in Bandit Learning
Mean rewards of actions are often correlated. The form of these correlations may be complex and unknown a priori, such as the preferences of a user for recommended products and their categories. To maximize statistical efficiency, it is…
I analyse the frequentist regret of the famous Gittins index strategy for multi-armed bandits with Gaussian noise and a finite horizon. Remarkably it turns out that this approach leads to finite-time regret guarantees comparable to those…
Optimal regret bounds for Multi-Armed Bandit problems are now well documented. They can be classified into two categories based on the growth rate with respect to the time horizon $T$: (i) small, distribution-dependent, bounds of order of…
Contextual linear bandits is a rich and theoretically important model that has many practical applications. Recently, this setup gained a lot of interest in applications over wireless where communication constraints can be a performance…
This work addresses the mediator feedback problem, a bandit game where the decision set consists of a number of policies, each associated with a probability distribution over a common space of outcomes. Upon choosing a policy, the learner…
We consider a bandit recommendations problem in which an agent's preferences (representing selection probabilities over recommended items) evolve as a function of past selections, according to an unknown $\textit{preference model}$. In each…
This paper studies regret minimization in a multi-armed bandit. It is well known that side information, such as the prior distribution of arm means in Thompson sampling, can improve the statistical efficiency of the bandit algorithm. While…
We consider the contextual bandit problem where at each time, the agent only has access to a noisy version of the context and the error variance (or an estimator of this variance). This setting is motivated by a wide range of applications…
In many sequential decision problems, an agent performs a repeated task. He then suffers regret and obtains information that he may use in the following rounds. However, sometimes the agent may also obtain information and avoid suffering…
In many bandit problems, the maximal reward achievable by a policy is often unknown in advance. We consider the problem of estimating the optimal policy value in the sublinear data regime before the optimal policy is even learnable. We…
We consider exponential two-armed bandit problem in which incomes are described by exponential distribution densities. We develop Bayesian approach and present recursive equation for determination of Bayesian strategy and Bayesian risk. In…
We study linear contextual bandits with access to a large, confounded, offline dataset that was sampled from some fixed policy. We show that this problem is closely related to a variant of the bandit problem with side information. We…
In this paper, the problem of maximizing a black-box function $f:\mathcal{X} \to \mathbb{R}$ is studied in the Bayesian framework with a Gaussian Process (GP) prior. In particular, a new algorithm for this problem is proposed, and high…
The dueling bandit problem, an essential variation of the traditional multi-armed bandit problem, has become significantly prominent recently due to its broad applications in online advertising, recommendation systems, information…
The information ratio offers an approach to assessing the efficacy with which an agent balances between exploration and exploitation. Originally, this was defined to be the ratio between squared expected regret and the mutual information…
How to explore efficiently is a central problem in multi-armed bandits. In this paper, we introduce the metadata-based multi-task bandit problem, where the agent needs to solve a large number of related multi-armed bandit tasks and can…
Exploration policies in Bayesian bandits maximize the average reward over problem instances drawn from some distribution $\mathcal{P}$. In this work, we learn such policies for an unknown distribution $\mathcal{P}$ using samples from…
We study the problem of Gaussian bandits with general side information, as first introduced by Wu, Szepesvari, and Gyorgy. In this setting, the play of an arm reveals information about other arms, according to an arbitrary a priori known…
Contextual bandits are widely used in Internet services from news recommendation to advertising, and to Web search. Generalized linear models (logistical regression in particular) have demonstrated stronger performance than linear models in…
We prove that Thompson sampling exhibits $\tilde{O}(\sigma d \sqrt{T} + d r \sqrt{\mathrm{Tr}(\Sigma_0)})$ Bayesian regret in the linear-Gaussian bandit with a $\mathcal{N}(\mu_0, \Sigma_0)$ prior distribution on the coefficients, where $d$…