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Restless bandit problems are instances of non-stationary multi-armed bandits. These problems have been studied well from the optimization perspective, where the goal is to efficiently find a near-optimal policy when system parameters are…
Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithms are a widely-used class of sequential algorithms for the $K$-armed bandit problem. Despite extensive research over the past decades aimed at understanding their asymptotic and (near) minimax…
Motivated by runtime verification of QoS requirements in self-adaptive and self-organizing systems that are able to reconfigure their structure and behavior in response to runtime data, we propose a QoS-aware variant of Thompson sampling…
The challenge of identifying the best feasible arm within a fixed budget has attracted considerable interest in recent years. However, a notable gap remains in the literature: the exact exponential rate at which the error probability…
AI systems that learn through reward feedback about the actions they take are increasingly deployed in domains that have significant impact on our daily life. However, in many cases the online rewards should not be the only guiding…
We consider a contextual combinatorial bandit problem where in each round a learning agent selects a subset of arms and receives feedback on the selected arms according to their scores. The score of an arm is an unknown function of the…
The design and performance analysis of bandit algorithms in the presence of stage-wise safety or reliability constraints has recently garnered significant interest. In this work, we consider the linear stochastic bandit problem under…
We study best arm identification in a variant of the multi-armed bandit problem where the learner has limited precision in arm selection. The learner can only sample arms via certain exploration bundles, which we refer to as boxes. In…
Statistical inference from data generated by multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms is challenging due to their adaptive, non-i.i.d. nature. A classical manifestation is that sample averages of arm rewards under bandit sampling may fail to…
Multi-arm bandits are gaining popularity as they enable real-world sequential decision-making across application areas, including clinical trials, recommender systems, and online decision-making. Consequently, there is an increased desire…
What can an agent learn in a stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem from a dataset that contains just a single sample for each arm? Surprisingly, in this work, we demonstrate that even in such a data-starved setting it may still be…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a classical learning task that exemplifies the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. However, standard formulations do not take into account {\em risk}. In online decision making systems, risk is a…
Non-stationary multi-armed bandits (NS-MABs) model sequential decision-making problems in which the expected rewards of a set of actions, a.k.a.~arms, evolve over time. In this paper, we fill a gap in the literature by providing a novel…
Online A/B experiments generate millions of user-activity records each day, yet experimenters need timely forecasts to guide roll-outs and safeguard user experience. Motivated by the problem of activity prediction for A/B tests at Amazon,…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a ubiquitous decision-making problem that exemplifies exploration-exploitation tradeoff. Standard formulations exclude risk in decision making. Risknotably complicates the basic reward-maximising…
A key feature of sequential decision making under uncertainty is a need to balance between exploiting--choosing the best action according to the current knowledge, and exploring--obtaining information about values of other actions. The…
The multi-armed bandit problem is a popular model for studying exploration/exploitation trade-off in sequential decision problems. Many algorithms are now available for this well-studied problem. One of the earliest algorithms, given by W.…
Networks are central to many economic and organizational applications, including workplace team formation, social platform recommendations, and classroom friendship development. In these settings, networks are modeled as graphs, with agents…
It has been recently shown in the literature that the sample averages from online learning experiments are biased when used to estimate the mean reward. To correct the bias, off-policy evaluation methods, including importance sampling and…
We consider the problem of finding, through adaptive sampling, which of $n$ options (arms) has the largest mean. Our objective is to determine a rule which identifies the best arm with a fixed minimum confidence using as few observations as…