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Most bandit algorithm designs are purely theoretical. Therefore, they have strong regret guarantees, but also are often too conservative in practice. In this work, we pioneer the idea of algorithm design by minimizing the empirical Bayes…
The demand for seamless Internet access under extreme user mobility, such as on high-speed trains and vehicles, has become a norm rather than an exception. However, the 4G/5G mobile network is not always reliable to meet this demand, with…
We study A/B experiments that are designed to compare the performance of two recommendation algorithms. Prior work has observed that the stable unit treatment value assumption (SUTVA) often does not hold in large-scale recommendation…
Many real-world experimental design problems (a) evaluate multiple experimental conditions in parallel and (b) replicate each condition multiple times due to large and heteroscedastic observation noise. Given a fixed total budget, this…
Meta-, multi-task, and federated learning can be all viewed as solving similar tasks, drawn from a distribution that reflects task similarities. We provide a unified view of all these problems, as learning to act in a hierarchical Bayesian…
Adaptive and sequential experiment design is a well-studied area in numerous domains. We survey and synthesize the work of the online statistical learning paradigm referred to as multi-armed bandits integrating the existing research as a…
We consider a finite-horizon multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem in a Bayesian setting, for which we propose an information relaxation sampling framework. With this framework, we define an intuitive family of control policies that include…
Thompson sampling, a Bayesian method for balancing exploration and exploitation in bandit problems, has theoretical guarantees and exhibits strong empirical performance in many domains. Traditional Thompson sampling, however, assumes…
Thompson sampling is a popular algorithm for solving multi-armed bandit problems, and has been applied in a wide range of applications, from website design to portfolio optimization. In such applications, however, the number of choices (or…
We study the problem of best-arm identification with fixed confidence in stochastic linear bandits. The objective is to identify the best arm with a given level of certainty while minimizing the sampling budget. We devise a simple algorithm…
We study stage-wise conservative linear stochastic bandits: an instance of bandit optimization, which accounts for (unknown) safety constraints that appear in applications such as online advertising and medical trials. At each stage, the…
We propose $\tt RandUCB$, a bandit strategy that builds on theoretically derived confidence intervals similar to upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms, but akin to Thompson sampling (TS), it uses randomization to trade off exploration and…
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…
We consider the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem, where an agent sequentially chooses actions and observes rewards for the actions it took. While the majority of algorithms try to minimize the regret, i.e., the cumulative difference between…
This paper proposes near-optimal algorithms for the pure-exploration linear bandit problem in the fixed confidence and fixed budget settings. Leveraging ideas from the theory of suprema of empirical processes, we provide an algorithm whose…
Thompson sampling has proven effective across a wide range of stationary bandit environments. However, as we demonstrate in this paper, it can perform poorly when applied to non-stationary environments. We attribute such failures to the…
Motivated by the pressing need for efficient optimization in online recommender systems, we revisit the cascading bandit model proposed by Kveton et al. (2015). While Thompson sampling (TS) algorithms have been shown to be empirically…
We consider the problem of best arm identification in a variant of multi-armed bandits called linked bandits. In a single interaction with linked bandits, multiple arms are played sequentially until one of them receives a positive reward.…
We consider applying multi-armed bandits to model-assisted designs for dose-finding clinical trials. Multi-armed bandits are very simple and powerful methods to determine actions to maximize a reward in a limited number of trials. Among the…
In this report, we survey Bayesian Optimization methods focussed on the Multi-Armed Bandit Problem. We take the help of the paper "Portfolio Allocation for Bayesian Optimization". We report a small literature survey on the acquisition…