Related papers: Reward-Biased Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Ne…

The Reward-Biased Maximum Likelihood Estimate (RBMLE) for adaptive control of Markov chains was proposed to overcome the central obstacle of what is variously called the fundamental "closed-identifiability problem" of adaptive control, the…

Inspired by the Reward-Biased Maximum Likelihood Estimate method of adaptive control, we propose RBMLE -- a novel family of learning algorithms for stochastic multi-armed bandits (SMABs). For a broad range of SMABs including both the…

We study the stochastic contextual bandit problem, where the reward is generated from an unknown function with additive noise. No assumption is made about the reward function other than boundedness. We propose a new algorithm, NeuralUCB,…

We use the Reward Biased Maximum Likelihood Estimation (RBMLE) algorithm to learn optimal policies for constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs). We analyze the learning regrets of RBMLE.

Contextual bandits are a rich model for sequential decision making given side information, with important applications, e.g., in recommender systems. We propose novel algorithms for contextual bandits harnessing neural networks to…

Modifying the reward-biased maximum likelihood method originally proposed in the adaptive control literature, we propose novel learning algorithms to handle the explore-exploit trade-off in linear bandits problems as well as generalized…

Thanks to the power of representation learning, neural contextual bandit algorithms demonstrate remarkable performance improvement against their classical counterparts. But because their exploration has to be performed in the entire neural…

Contextual bandit learning is a reinforcement learning problem where the learner repeatedly receives a set of features (context), takes an action and receives a reward based on the action and context. We consider this problem under a…

Contextual dueling bandit is used to model the bandit problems, where a learner's goal is to find the best arm for a given context using observed noisy human preference feedback over the selected arms for the past contexts. However,…

We consider the problem of controlling an unknown stochastic linear system with quadratic costs - called the adaptive LQ control problem. We re-examine an approach called ''Reward Biased Maximum Likelihood Estimate'' (RBMLE) that was…

We consider the infinite-horizon linear Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), where the transition probabilities of the dynamic model can be linearly parameterized with the help of a predefined low-dimensional feature mapping. While the…

We consider the stochastic linear (multi-armed) contextual bandit problem with the possibility of hidden simple multi-armed bandit structure in which the rewards are independent of the contextual information. Algorithms that are designed…

We investigate the problem of unconstrained combinatorial multi-armed bandits with full-bandit feedback and stochastic rewards for submodular maximization. Previous works investigate the same problem assuming a submodular and monotone…

Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…

We study a nonparametric contextual bandit problem where the expected reward functions belong to a H\"older class with smoothness parameter $\beta$. We show how this interpolates between two extremes that were previously studied in…

Designing efficient general-purpose contextual bandit algorithms that work with large -- or even continuous -- action spaces would facilitate application to important scenarios such as information retrieval, recommendation systems, and…

This paper studies model-based bandit and reinforcement learning (RL) with nonlinear function approximations. We propose to study convergence to approximate local maxima because we show that global convergence is statistically intractable…

We consider the problem of contextual bandits and imitation learning, where the learner lacks direct knowledge of the executed action's reward. Instead, the learner can actively query an expert at each round to compare two actions and…

We consider the neural contextual bandit problem. In contrast to the existing work which primarily focuses on ReLU neural nets, we consider a general set of smooth activation functions. Under this more general setting, (i) we derive…

In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, instance-dependent algorithms attain improved performance on "easy" problems with a gap between the best and second-best arm. Are similar guarantees possible for contextual bandits? While…