Related papers: Best Arm Identification in Stochastic Bandits: Bey…
When multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms allocate pulls among competing arms, the resulting allocation can exhibit huge variation. This is particularly harmful in modern applications such as learning-enhanced platform operations and…
The beam alignment (BA) problem consists in accurately aligning the transmitter and receiver beams to establish a reliable communication link in wireless communication systems. Existing BA methods search the entire beam space to identify…
The stochastic multi-arm bandit problem has been extensively studied under standard assumptions on the arm's distribution (e.g bounded with known support, exponential family, etc). These assumptions are suitable for many real-world problems…
This study investigates minimax and Bayes optimal strategies for fixed-budget best-arm identification. We consider an adaptive procedure consisting of a sampling phase followed by a recommendation phase, and we design an adaptive experiment…
We study the best-arm identification problem with fixed confidence when contextual (covariate) information is available in stochastic bandits. Although we can use contextual information in each round, we are interested in the marginalized…
Active learning methods have shown great promise in reducing the number of samples necessary for learning. As automated learning systems are adopted into real-time, real-world decision-making pipelines, it is increasingly important that…
Sharpe Ratio (SR) is a critical parameter in characterizing financial time series as it jointly considers the reward and the volatility of any stock/portfolio through its variance. Deriving online algorithms for optimizing the SR is…
Motivated by models of human decision making proposed to explain commonly observed deviations from conventional expected value preferences, we formulate two stochastic multi-armed bandit problems with distorted probabilities on the reward…
Pure exploration in multi-armed bandits has emerged as an important framework for modeling decision-making and search under uncertainty. In modern applications, however, one is often faced with a tremendously large number of options. Even…
We study the best-arm identification problem in sparse linear bandits under the fixed-budget setting. In sparse linear bandits, the unknown feature vector $\theta^*$ may be of large dimension $d$, but only a few, say $s \ll d$ of these…
Combinatorial bandits extend the classical bandit framework to settings where the learner selects multiple arms in each round, motivated by applications such as online recommendation and assortment optimization. While extensions of upper…
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…
We consider the classic problem of $(\epsilon,\delta)$-PAC learning a best arm where the goal is to identify with confidence $1-\delta$ an arm whose mean is an $\epsilon$-approximation to that of the highest mean arm in a multi-armed bandit…
Identifying the best arm of a multi-armed bandit is a central problem in bandit optimization. We study a quantum computational version of this problem with coherent oracle access to states encoding the reward probabilities of each arm as…
We investigate the sample complexity of learning the optimal arm for multi-task bandit problems. Arms consist of two components: one that is shared across tasks (that we call representation) and one that is task-specific (that we call…
Classical multi-armed bandit problems use the expected value of an arm as a metric to evaluate its goodness. However, the expected value is a risk-neutral metric. In many applications like finance, one is interested in balancing the…
For the model of constrained multi-armed bandit, we show that by construction there exists an index-based deterministic asymptotically optimal algorithm. The optimality is achieved by the convergence of the probability of choosing an…
Mode estimation is a classical problem in statistics with a wide range of applications in machine learning. Despite this, there is little understanding in its robustness properties under possibly adversarial data contamination. In this…
We propose online algorithms for sequential learning in the contextual multi-armed bandit setting. Our approach is to partition the context space and then optimally combine all of the possible mappings between the partition regions and the…
Although many algorithms for the multi-armed bandit problem are well-understood theoretically, empirical confirmation of their effectiveness is generally scarce. This paper presents a thorough empirical study of the most popular multi-armed…