Related papers: Beyond the Best: Estimating Distribution Functiona…
We study a generalization of the multi-armed bandit problem with multiple plays where there is a cost associated with pulling each arm and the agent has a budget at each time that dictates how much she can expect to spend. We derive an…
The improving multi-armed bandits problem is a formal model for allocating effort under uncertainty, motivated by scenarios such as investing research effort into new technologies, performing clinical trials, and hyperparameter selection…
In a fixed-confidence pure exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits, an algorithm iteratively samples arms and should stop as early as possible and return the correct answer to a query about the arms distributions. We are…
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…
Many real-world functions are defined over both categorical and category-specific continuous variables and thus cannot be optimized by traditional Bayesian optimization (BO) methods. To optimize such functions, we propose a new method that…
We introduce a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, in which bandits are streamed one at a time to the player, and at each point, the player can either choose to pull the current bandit or move on to the next bandit. Once a…
Combinatorial bandits with semi-bandit feedback generalize multi-armed bandits, where the agent chooses sets of arms and observes a noisy reward for each arm contained in the chosen set. The action set satisfies a given structure such as…
This paper considers a multi-armed bandit game where the number of arms is much larger than the maximum budget and is effectively infinite. We characterize necessary and sufficient conditions on the total budget for an algorithm to return…
We study the Improving Multi-Armed Bandit (IMAB) problem, where the reward obtained from an arm increases with the number of pulls it receives. This model provides an elegant abstraction for many real-world problems in domains such as…
We consider a non-stationary formulation of the stochastic multi-armed bandit where the rewards are no longer assumed to be identically distributed. For the best-arm identification task, we introduce a version of Successive Elimination…
We consider the question introduced by \cite{Mason2020} of identifying all the $\varepsilon$-optimal arms in a finite stochastic multi-armed bandit with Gaussian rewards. We give two lower bounds on the sample complexity of any algorithm…
We study stochastic linear optimization problem with bandit feedback. The set of arms take values in an $N$-dimensional space and belong to a bounded polyhedron described by finitely many linear inequalities. We provide a lower bound for…
We present a new type of acquisition functions for online decision making in multi-armed and contextual bandit problems with extreme payoffs. Specifically, we model the payoff function as a Gaussian process and formulate a novel type of…
In this paper, we study a slate bandit problem where the function that determines the slate-level reward is non-separable: the optimal value of the function cannot be determined by learning the optimal action for each slot. We are mainly…
We consider stochastic multi-armed bandit problems with complex actions over a set of basic arms, where the decision maker plays a complex action rather than a basic arm in each round. The reward of the complex action is some function of…
We study finite-armed stochastic bandits where the rewards of each arm might be correlated to those of other arms. We introduce a novel phased algorithm that exploits the given structure to build confidence sets over the parameters of the…
We lay the foundations of a non-parametric theory of best-arm identification in multi-armed bandits with a fixed budget T. We consider general, possibly non-parametric, models D for distributions over the arms; an overarching example is the…
In this paper, we study the pure exploration bandit model on general distribution functions, which means that the reward function of each arm depends on the whole distribution, not only its mean. We adapt the racing framework and LUCB…
In order to distribute the best arm identification task as close as possible to the user's devices, on the edge of the Radio Access Network, we propose a new problem setting, where distributed players collaborate to find the best arm. This…
We study bandit best-arm identification with arbitrary and potentially adversarial rewards. A simple random uniform learner obtains the optimal rate of error in the adversarial scenario. However, this type of strategy is suboptimal when the…