Related papers: Bandit Social Learning: Exploration under Myopic B…
This paper studies bandit problems where an agent has access to offline data that might be utilized to potentially improve the estimation of each arm's reward distribution. A major obstacle in this setting is the existence of compound…
The stochastic multi-armed bandit model captures the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. We study the effects of competition and cooperation on this tradeoff. Suppose there are $k$ arms and two players, Alice and Bob. In every…
We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem with delayed impact of actions. In our setting, actions taken in the past impact the arm rewards in the subsequent future. This delayed impact of actions is prevalent in the real…
In this work, we investigate the problem of adapting to the presence or absence of causal structure in multi-armed bandit problems. In addition to the usual reward signal, we assume the learner has access to additional variables, observed…
Stochastic multi-armed bandits solve the Exploration-Exploitation dilemma and ultimately maximize the expected reward. Nonetheless, in many practical problems, maximizing the expected reward is not the most desirable objective. In this…
We initiate the study of multi-stage episodic reinforcement learning under adversarial corruptions in both the rewards and the transition probabilities of the underlying system extending recent results for the special case of stochastic…
Bandit based optimisation has a remarkable advantage over gradient based approaches due to their global perspective, which eliminates the danger of getting stuck at local optima. However, for continuous optimisation problems or problems…
Online learning algorithms, widely used to power search and content optimization on the web, must balance exploration and exploitation, potentially sacrificing the experience of current users for information that will lead to better…
In this paper we propose a novel experimental design-based algorithm to minimize regret in online stochastic linear and combinatorial bandits. While existing literature tends to focus on optimism-based algorithms--which have been shown to…
Current music recommender systems typically act in a greedy fashion by recommending songs with the highest user ratings. Greedy recommendation, however, is suboptimal over the long term: it does not actively gather information on user…
We consider a special case of bandit problems, namely batched bandits. Motivated by natural restrictions of recommender systems and e-commerce platforms, we assume that a learning agent observes responses batched in groups over a certain…
We study a multi-armed bandit problem in a dynamic environment where arm rewards evolve in a correlated fashion according to a Markov chain. Different than much of the work on related problems, in our formulation a learning algorithm does…
In networked environments, users frequently share recommendations about content, products, services, and courses of action with others. The extent to which such recommendations are successful and adopted is highly contextual, dependent on…
A recent body of work addresses safety constraints in explore-and-exploit systems. Such constraints arise where, for example, exploration is carried out by individuals whose welfare should be balanced with overall welfare. In this paper, we…
We study the problem of federated stochastic multi-arm contextual bandits with unknown contexts, in which M agents are faced with different bandits and collaborate to learn. The communication model consists of a central server and the…
We consider the stochastic linear (multi-armed) contextual bandit problem with the possibility of hidden simple multi-armed bandit structure in which the rewards are independent of the contextual information. Algorithms that are designed…
Multi-player Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) have been extensively studied in the literature, motivated by applications to Cognitive Radio systems. Driven by such applications as well, we motivate the introduction of several levels of feedback…
A popular computer puzzle, the game of Minesweeper requires its human players to have a mix of both luck and strategy to succeed. Analyzing these aspects more formally, in our research we assessed the feasibility of a novel methodology…
We study the problem of designing replication-proof bandit mechanisms when agents strategically register or replicate their own arms to maximize their payoff. Specifically, we consider Bayesian agents who only know the distribution from…
We study the offline contextual bandit problem, where we aim to acquire an optimal policy using observational data. However, this data usually contains two deficiencies: (i) some variables that confound actions are not observed, and (ii)…