Related papers: Bandit Theory and Thompson Sampling-Guided Directe…

Tree-form sequential decision making (TFSDM) extends classical one-shot decision making by modeling tree-form interactions between an agent and a potentially adversarial environment. It captures the online decision-making problems that each…

Thompson sampling has become a ubiquitous approach to online decision problems with bandit feedback. The key algorithmic task for Thompson sampling is drawing a sample from the posterior of the optimal action. We propose an alternative arm…

Runtime analysis, as a branch of the theory of AI, studies how the number of iterations algorithms take before finding a solution (its runtime) depends on the design of the algorithm and the problem structure. Drift analysis is a…

Prompting has emerged as the dominant paradigm for adapting large, pre-trained transformer-based models to downstream tasks. The Prompting Decision Transformer (PDT) enables large-scale, multi-task offline Reinforcement Learning (RL)…

Originally motivated by default risk management applications, this paper investigates a novel problem, referred to as the profitable bandit problem here. At each step, an agent chooses a subset of the K possible actions. For each action…

We address multi-armed bandits (MAB) where the objective is to maximize the cumulative reward under a probabilistic linear constraint. For a few real-world instances of this problem, constrained extensions of the well-known Thompson…

We investigate bandit convex optimization (BCO) with delayed feedback, where only the loss value of the action is revealed under an arbitrary delay. Let $n,T,\bar{d}$ denote the dimensionality, time horizon, and average delay, respectively.…

In performative prediction, the deployment of a predictive model triggers a shift in the data distribution. As these shifts are typically unknown ahead of time, the learner needs to deploy a model to get feedback about the distribution it…

Reinforcement learning is an attractive approach to learn good resource allocation and scheduling policies based on data when the system model is unknown. However, the cumulative regret of most RL algorithms scales as $\tilde O(\mathsf{S}…

We study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem and design new policies that enjoy both worst-case optimality for expected regret and light-tailed risk for regret distribution. Specifically, our policy design (i) enjoys the worst-case…

In many fields of study, we only observe lower bounds on the true response value of some experiments. When fitting a regression model to predict the distribution of the outcomes, we cannot simply drop these right-censored observations, but…

Differential evolution (DE) has competitive performance on constrained optimization problems (COPs), which targets at searching for global optimal solution without violating the constraints. Generally, researchers pay more attention on…

Thompson sampling (TS) is a Bayesian randomized exploration strategy that samples options (e.g., system parameters or control laws) from the current posterior and then applies the selected option that is optimal for a task, thereby…

In this paper, we investigate the performance of Thompson Sampling (TS) for online learning with censored feedback, focusing primarily on the classic repeated newsvendor model--a foundational framework in inventory management--and…

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…

Working towards the development of an evolvable cancer treatment simulator, the investigation of Differential Evolution was considered, motivated by the high efficiency of variations of this technique in real-valued problems. A basic DE…

Most existing approximate Thompson Sampling (TS) algorithms for multi-armed bandits use Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) or its variants in each round to sample from the posterior, relaxing the need for conjugacy assumptions…

To reduce experimental effort associated with directed protein evolution and to explore the sequence space encoded by mutating multiple positions simultaneously, we incorporate machine learning in the directed evolution workflow.…

This paper develops a viable notion of learning for sampling-based algorithms that applies in broader settings than previously considered. More specifically, we model a discounted infinite-horizon MDPs with Borel state and action spaces,…

This paper considers the problem of distributed bandit online convex optimization with time-varying coupled inequality constraints. This problem can be defined as a repeated game between a group of learners and an adversary. The learners…