Related papers: On the Sample Complexity of Representation Learnin…
We consider the best arm identification problem in the stochastic multi-armed bandit framework where each arm has a tiny probability of realizing large rewards while with overwhelming probability the reward is zero. A key application of…
We consider the problem of learning the optimal action-value function in the discounted-reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). We prove a new PAC bound on the sample-complexity of model-based value iteration algorithm in the presence of…
In probably approximately correct (PAC) reinforcement learning (RL), an agent is required to identify an $\epsilon$-optimal policy with probability $1-\delta$. While minimax optimal algorithms exist for this problem, its instance-dependent…
We consider a variant of the best arm identification task in stochastic multi-armed bandits. Motivated by risk-averse decision-making problems, our goal is to identify a set of $m$ arms with the highest $\tau$-quantile values within a fixed…
Best arm identification (or, pure exploration) in multi-armed bandits is a fundamental problem in machine learning. In this paper we study the distributed version of this problem where we have multiple agents, and they want to learn the…
In many applications, evaluating the effectiveness of different alternatives comes with varying costs or resource usage. Motivated by such heterogeneity, we study the Best Arm Identification with Resource Constraints (BAIwRC) problem, where…
Motivated by recursive learning in Markov Decision Processes, this paper studies best-arm identification in bandit problems where each arm's reward is drawn from a multinomial distribution with a known support. We compare the performance {…
We present a PAC-Bayesian analysis of lifelong learning. In the lifelong learning problem, a sequence of learning tasks is observed one-at-a-time, and the goal is to transfer information acquired from previous tasks to new learning tasks.…
We study the problem of identifying the best arm in a stochastic multi-armed bandit game. Given a set of $n$ arms indexed from $1$ to $n$, each arm $i$ is associated with an unknown reward distribution supported on $[0,1]$ with mean…
We study the Pareto Set Identification (PSI) problem in a structured multi-output linear bandit model. In this setting, each arm is associated a feature vector belonging to $\mathbb{R}^h$, and its mean vector in $\mathbb{R}^d$ linearly…
We introduce a variant of the classical PAC multi-armed bandit problem. There is an ordered set of $n$ arms $A[1],\dots,A[n]$, each with some stochastic reward drawn from some unknown bounded distribution. The goal is to identify the…
We study pure exploration with infinitely many bandit arms generated i.i.d. from an unknown distribution. Our goal is to efficiently select a single high quality arm whose average reward is, with probability $1-\delta$, within $\varepsilon$…
In this study, we derive Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) bounds on the asymptotic sample-complexity for RL within the infinite-horizon Markov Decision Process (MDP) setting that are sharper than those in existing literature. The…
We present an efficient and generalised procedure to accurately identify the best (or near best) performing algorithm for each sub-task in a multi-problem domain. Our approach treats this as a set of best arm identification problems for…
We study multiclass PAC learning with bandit feedback, where inputs are classified into one of $K$ possible labels and feedback is limited to whether or not the predicted labels are correct. Our main contribution is in designing a novel…
Motivated by the task of hyperparameter optimization, we introduce the non-stochastic best-arm identification problem. Within the multi-armed bandit literature, the cumulative regret objective enjoys algorithms and analyses for both the…
We focus on the problem of best-arm identification in a stochastic multi-arm bandit with temporally decreasing variances for the arms' rewards. We model arm rewards as Gaussian random variables with fixed means and variances that decrease…
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…
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…
In this paper, we study the non-asymptotic sample complexity for the pure exploration problem in contextual bandits and tabular reinforcement learning (RL): identifying an epsilon-optimal policy from a set of policies with high probability.…