Related papers: Dynamic priority allocation via restless bandit ma…
The purpose of this paper is to provide further understanding into the structure of the sequential allocation ("stochastic multi-armed bandit", or MAB) problem by establishing probability one finite horizon bounds and convergence rates for…
We study the restless bandit associated with an extremely simple scalar Kalman filter model in discrete time. Under certain assumptions, we prove that the problem is indexable in the sense that the Whittle index is a non-decreasing function…
Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving many real-world interactive machine learning problems. Despite multiple recent successes on statistically and computationally efficient methods, the practical behavior of these…
We study episodic reinforcement learning (RL) in non-stationary linear kernel Markov decision processes (MDPs). In this setting, both the reward function and the transition kernel are linear with respect to the given feature maps and are…
Current multi-armed bandit approaches in recommender systems (RS) have focused more on devising effective exploration techniques, while not adequately addressing common exploitation challenges related to distributional changes and item…
Process malleability has proved to have a highly positive impact on the resource utilization and global productivity in data centers compared with the conventional static resource allocation policy. However, the non-negligible additional…
Consider a set of jobs with independent random service times to be scheduled on a single machine. The jobs can be surgeries in an operating room, patients' appointments in outpatient clinics, etc. The challenge is to determine the optimal…
Indexing intervals is a fundamental problem, finding a wide range of applications. Recent work on managing large collections of intervals in main memory focused on overlap joins and temporal aggregation problems. In this paper, we propose…
In this paper we consider the problem of learning the optimal policy for uncontrolled restless bandit problems. In an uncontrolled restless bandit problem, there is a finite set of arms, each of which when pulled yields a positive reward.…
We consider a multi-armed bandit problem in a setting where each arm produces a noisy reward realization which depends on an observable random covariate. As opposed to the traditional static multi-armed bandit problem, this setting allows…
Contextual bandits are widely-used in the study of learning-based control policies for finite action spaces. While the problem is well-studied for bandits with perfectly observed context vectors, little is known about the case of…
This paper investigates the optimization problem of an infinite stage discrete time Markov decision process (MDP) with a long-run average metric considering both mean and variance of rewards together. Such performance metric is important…
High-content screening microscopy generates large amounts of live-cell imaging data, yet its potential remains constrained by the inability to determine when and where to image most effectively. Optimally balancing acquisition time,…
We consider the channel access problem in a multi-channel opportunistic communication system with imperfect channel sensing, where the state of each channel evolves as a non independent and identically distributed Markov process. This…
We consider the infinite-horizon discounted optimal control problem formalized by Markov Decision Processes. We focus on several approximate variations of the Policy Iteration algorithm: Approximate Policy Iteration, Conservative Policy…
Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits is crucial for assessing new policies using existing data without costly experimentation. However, current OPE methods, such as Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) and Doubly Robust (DR)…
Equitably allocating limited resources in high-stakes domains-such as education, employment, and healthcare-requires balancing short-term utility with long-term impact, while accounting for delayed outcomes, hidden heterogeneity, and…
We consider a novel variant of the contextual bandit problem (i.e., the multi-armed bandit with side-information, or context, available to a decision-maker) where the reward associated with each context-based decision may not always be…
Prompting has emerged as the dominant paradigm for adapting large, pre-trained transformer-based models to downstream tasks. The Prompting Decision Transformer (PDT) enables large-scale, multi-task offline Reinforcement Learning (RL)…
The problem of efficient resource allocation has drawn significant attention in many scientific disciplines due to its direct societal benefits, such as energy savings. Traditional approaches in addressing online resource allocation…