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Linear bandits have a wide variety of applications including recommendation systems yet they make one strong assumption: the algorithms must know an upper bound $S$ on the norm of the unknown parameter $\theta^*$ that governs the reward…
We address online linear optimization problems when the possible actions of the decision maker are represented by binary vectors. The regret of the decision maker is the difference between her realized loss and the best loss she would have…
We address online combinatorial optimization when the player has a prior over the adversary's sequence of losses. In this framework, Russo and Van Roy proposed an information-theoretic analysis of Thompson Sampling based on the information…
Cascading bandits is a natural and popular model that frames the task of learning to rank from Bernoulli click feedback in a bandit setting. For the case of unstructured rewards, we prove matching upper and lower bounds for the…
We study Online Convex Optimization (OCO) with adversarial constraints, where an online algorithm must make sequential decisions to minimize both convex loss functions and cumulative constraint violations. We focus on a setting where the…
Contextual bandits serve as a fundamental model for many sequential decision making tasks. The most popular theoretically justified approaches are based on the optimism principle. While these algorithms can be practical, they are known to…
In this paper, we consider stochastic multi-armed bandits (MABs) with heavy-tailed rewards, whose $p$-th moment is bounded by a constant $\nu_{p}$ for $1<p\leq2$. First, we propose a novel robust estimator which does not require $\nu_{p}$…
This paper investigates the problem of generalized linear bandits with heavy-tailed rewards, whose $(1+\epsilon)$-th moment is bounded for some $\epsilon\in (0,1]$. Although there exist methods for generalized linear bandits, most of them…
Fast changing states or volatile environments pose a significant challenge to online optimization, which needs to perform rapid adaptation under limited observation. In this paper, we give query and regret optimal bandit algorithms under…
We study linear contextual bandits in the misspecified setting, where the expected reward function can be approximated by a linear function class up to a bounded misspecification level $\zeta>0$. We propose an algorithm based on a novel…
Bayesian bandit algorithms with approximate Bayesian inference have been widely used in real-world applications. Despite the superior practical performance, their theoretical justification is less investigated in the literature, especially…
We study the stochastic multi-player multi-armed bandit problem. In this problem, $m$ players cooperate to maximize their total reward from $K > m$ arms. However the players cannot communicate and are penalized (e.g. receive no reward) if…
We study the problem of online learning in Stackelberg games with side information between a leader and a sequence of followers. In every round the leader observes contextual information and commits to a mixed strategy, after which the…
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…
Motivated by modern applications, such as online advertisement and recommender systems, we study the top-$k$ extreme contextual bandits problem, where the total number of arms can be enormous, and the learner is allowed to select $k$ arms…
We consider the thresholding bandit problem, whose goal is to find arms of mean rewards above a given threshold $\theta$, with a fixed budget of $T$ trials. We introduce LSA, a new, simple and anytime algorithm that aims to minimize the…
We study the problem of worst case regret in piecewise stationary multi armed bandits. While the minimax theory for stationary bandits is well established, understanding analogous limits in time-varying settings is challenging. Existing…
We consider the problem of online combinatorial optimization under semi-bandit feedback. The goal of the learner is to sequentially select its actions from a combinatorial decision set so as to minimize its cumulative loss. We propose a…
We analyze the minimax regret of the adversarial bandit convex optimization problem. Focusing on the one-dimensional case, we prove that the minimax regret is $\widetilde\Theta(\sqrt{T})$ and partially resolve a decade-old open problem. Our…
We study stochastic linear bandits where, in each round, the learner receives a set of actions (i.e., feature vectors), from which it chooses an element and obtains a stochastic reward. The expected reward is a fixed but unknown linear…