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The Whittle index, which characterizes optimal policies for controlling certain single restless bandit projects (a Markov decision process with two actions: active and passive) is the basis for a widely used heuristic index policy for the…
We consider a class of restless multi-armed bandit problems (RMBP) that arises in dynamic multichannel access, user/server scheduling, and optimal activation in multi-agent systems. For this class of RMBP, we establish the indexability and…
The Whittle index, which characterizes optimal policies for controlling certain single restless bandit projects (a Markov decision process with two actions: active and passive) is the basis for a widely used heuristic index policy for the…
The trade-off between the cost of acquiring and processing data, and uncertainty due to a lack of data is fundamental in machine learning. A basic instance of this trade-off is the problem of deciding when to make noisy and costly…
Restless multi-armed bandits (RMABs) extend multi-armed bandits to allow for stateful arms, where the state of each arm evolves restlessly with different transitions depending on whether that arm is pulled. Solving RMABs requires…
This paper studies restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problems with unknown arm transition dynamics but with known correlated arm features. The goal is to learn a model to predict transition dynamics given features, where the Whittle index…
To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…
The Whittle index for restless bandits (two-action semi-Markov decision processes) provides an intuitively appealing optimal policy for controlling a single generic project that can be active (engaged) or passive (rested) at each decision…
We consider finite-horizon restless bandits with multiple pulls per period, which play an important role in recommender systems, active learning, revenue management, and many other areas. While an optimal policy can be computed, in…
We consider finite state restless multi-armed bandit problem. The decision maker can act on M bandits out of N bandits in each time step. The play of arm (active arm) yields state dependent rewards based on action and when the arm is not…
We study a finite-horizon restless multi-armed bandit problem with multiple actions, dubbed R(MA)^2B. The state of each arm evolves according to a controlled Markov decision process (MDP), and the reward of pulling an arm depends on both…
We study the problem of planning restless multi-armed bandits (RMABs) with multiple actions. This is a popular model for multi-agent systems with applications like multi-channel communication, monitoring and machine maintenance tasks, and…
Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…
The problem of offline reinforcement learning focuses on learning a good policy from a log of environment interactions. Past efforts for developing algorithms in this area have revolved around introducing constraints to online reinforcement…
We study automated intrusion prevention using reinforcement learning. In a novel approach, we formulate the problem of intrusion prevention as an optimal stopping problem. This formulation allows us insight into the structure of the optimal…
The Whittle index policy is a heuristic that has shown remarkably good performance (with guaranteed asymptotic optimality) when applied to the class of problems known as Restless Multi-Armed Bandit Problems (RMABPs). In this paper we…
Policy Iteration (PI) is a widely used family of algorithms to compute optimal policies for Markov Decision Problems (MDPs). We derive upper bounds on the running time of PI on Deterministic MDPs (DMDPs): the class of MDPs in which every…
Restless bandits are an important class of problems with applications in recommender systems, active learning, revenue management and other areas. We consider infinite-horizon discounted restless bandits with many arms where a fixed…
In this paper we consider the problem of learning the optimal policy for uncontrolled restless bandit problems. In an uncontrolled restless bandit problem, there is a finite set of arms, each of which when pulled yields a positive reward.…
In this paper, we formulate the adaptive learning problem---the problem of how to find an individualized learning plan (called policy) that chooses the most appropriate learning materials based on learner's latent traits---faced in adaptive…