Related papers: Dynamic priority allocation via restless bandit ma…
Load balancing is a common approach in web server farms or inventory routing problems. An important issue in such systems is to determine the server to which an incoming request should be routed to optimize a given performance criteria. In…
The problem of optimal motion planing and control is fundamental in robotics. However, this problem is intractable for continuous-time stochastic systems in general and the solution is difficult to approximate if non-instantaneous nonlinear…
In many embedded systems, such as imaging sys- tems, the system has a single designated purpose, and same threads are executed repeatedly. Profiling thread behavior, allows the system to allocate each thread its resources in a way that…
The multi-armed restless bandit problem is studied in the case where the pay-off distributions are stationary $\varphi$-mixing. This version of the problem provides a more realistic model for most real-world applications, but cannot be…
We study the Whittle index learning algorithm for restless multi-armed bandits (RMAB). We first present Q-learning algorithm and its variants -- speedy Q-learning (SQL), generalized speedy Q-learning (GSQL) and phase Q-learning (PhaseQL).…
This brief paper presents simple simulation-based algorithms for obtaining an approximately optimal policy in a given finite set in large finite constrained Markov decision processes. The algorithms are adapted from playing strategies for…
We introduce the functional bandit problem, where the objective is to find an arm that optimises a known functional of the unknown arm-reward distributions. These problems arise in many settings such as maximum entropy methods in natural…
We study contextual bandits with finitely many actions in which the reward of each arm follows a single-index model with an arm-specific index parameter and an unknown nonparametric link function. We consider a regime in which arms…
Modified policy iteration (MPI) is a dynamic programming algorithm that combines elements of policy iteration and value iteration. The convergence of MPI has been well studied in the context of discounted and average-cost MDPs. In this…
We consider decentralized restless multi-armed bandit problems with unknown dynamics and multiple players. The reward state of each arm transits according to an unknown Markovian rule when it is played and evolves according to an arbitrary…
LLMs are increasingly used to design reward functions based on human preferences in Reinforcement Learning (RL). We focus on LLM-designed rewards for Restless Multi-Armed Bandits, a framework for allocating limited resources among agents.…
Automating physical database design has remained a long-term interest in database research due to substantial performance gains afforded by optimised structures. Despite significant progress, a majority of today's commercial solutions are…
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…
Sequential portfolio selection has attracted increasing interests in the machine learning and quantitative finance communities in recent years. As a mathematical framework for reinforcement learning policies, the stochastic multi-armed…
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…
This paper addresses the poor finite-horizon performance of existing online \emph{restless bandit} (RB) algorithms, which stems from the prohibitive sample complexity of learning a full \emph{Markov decision process} (MDP) for each agent.…
Consider a multi-phase project management problem where the decision maker needs to deal with two issues: (a) how to allocate resources to projects within each phase, and (b) when to enter the next phase, so that the total expected reward…
We consider the problem of revenue-optimal dynamic mechanism design in settings where agents' types evolve over time as a function of their (both public and private) experience with items that are auctioned repeatedly over an infinite…
We consider approximate dynamic programming in $\gamma$-discounted Markov decision processes and apply it to approximate planning with linear value-function approximation. Our first contribution is a new variant of Approximate Policy…
In this paper, we introduce the notion of replicable policies in the context of stochastic bandits, one of the canonical problems in interactive learning. A policy in the bandit environment is called replicable if it pulls, with high…