Related papers: Hypothesis Transfer in Bandits by Weighted Models
Motivated by a range of applications, we study in this paper the problem of transfer learning for nonparametric contextual multi-armed bandits under the covariate shift model, where we have data collected on source bandits before the start…
Learning from prior tasks and transferring that experience to improve future performance is critical for building lifelong learning agents. Although results in supervised and reinforcement learning show that transfer may significantly…
Classic contextual bandit algorithms for linear models, such as LinUCB, assume that the reward distribution for an arm is modeled by a stationary linear regression. When the linear regression model is non-stationary over time, the regret of…
Continuously learning and leveraging the knowledge accumulated from prior tasks in order to improve future performance is a long standing machine learning problem. In this paper, we study the problem in the multi-armed bandit framework with…
We consider a sequential multi-task problem, where each task is modeled as the stochastic multi-armed bandit with K arms. We assume the bandit tasks are adjacently similar in the sense that the difference between the mean rewards of the…
Contextual bandits are a form of multi-armed bandit in which the agent has access to predictive side information (known as the context) for each arm at each time step, and have been used to model personalized news recommendation, ad…
We consider a sequential stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where the agent interacts with bandit over multiple episodes. The reward distribution of the arms remain constant throughout an episode but can change over different episodes.…
While classical formulations of multi-armed bandit problems assume that each arm's reward is independent and stationary, real-world applications often involve non-stationary environments and interdependencies between arms. In particular,…
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…
We consider a multi-armed bandit problem in which a set of arms is registered by each agent, and the agent receives reward when its arm is selected. An agent might strategically submit more arms with replications, which can bring more…
We study the non-contextual multi-armed bandit problem in a transfer learning setting: before any pulls, the learner is given N'_k i.i.d. samples from each source distribution nu'_k, and the true target distributions nu_k lie within a known…
Transferring knowledge from one environment to another is an essential ability of intelligent systems. Nevertheless, when two environments are different, naively transferring all knowledge may deteriorate the performance, a phenomenon known…
In this paper, we investigate the impact of context diversity on stochastic linear contextual bandits. As opposed to the previous view that contexts lead to more difficult bandit learning, we show that when the contexts are sufficiently…
In decision-making problems such as the multi-armed bandit, an agent learns sequentially by optimizing a certain feedback. While the mean reward criterion has been extensively studied, other measures that reflect an aversion to adverse…
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 consider a novel multi-armed bandit framework where the rewards obtained by pulling the arms are functions of a common latent random variable. The correlation between arms due to the common random source can be used to design a…
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…
We consider a stochastic bandit problem with countably many arms that belong to a finite set of types, each characterized by a unique mean reward. In addition, there is a fixed distribution over types which sets the proportion of each type…
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…
We consider a variant of the multi-armed bandit model, which we call multi-armed bandit problem with known trend, where the gambler knows the shape of the reward function of each arm but not its distribution. This new problem is motivated…