Related papers: Random Exploration in Bayesian Optimization: Order…
This paper investigates regret minimization, statistical inference, and their interplay in high-dimensional online decision-making based on the sparse linear context bandit model. We integrate the $\varepsilon$-greedy bandit algorithm for…
In this paper, we study the problem of Gaussian process (GP) bandits under relaxed optimization criteria stating that any function value above a certain threshold is "good enough". On the theoretical side, we study various {\em lenient…
We explore a stochastic contextual linear bandit problem where the agent observes a noisy, corrupted version of the true context through a noise channel with an unknown noise parameter. Our objective is to design an action policy that can…
Many expensive black-box optimisation problems are sensitive to their inputs. In these problems it makes more sense to locate a region of good designs, than a single-possibly fragile-optimal design. Expensive black-box functions can be…
The expected improvement (EI) algorithm is one of the most popular strategies for optimization under uncertainty due to its simplicity and efficiency. Despite its popularity, the theoretical aspects of this algorithm have not been properly…
This paper analyzes the problem of Gaussian process (GP) bandits with deterministic observations. The analysis uses a branch and bound algorithm that is related to the UCB algorithm of (Srinivas et al, 2010). For GPs with Gaussian…
We study a class of adversarial bandit optimization problems in which the loss functions may be non-convex and non-smooth. In each round, the learner observes a loss that consists of an underlying linear component together with an…
We study bandit model selection in stochastic environments. Our approach relies on a meta-algorithm that selects between candidate base algorithms. We develop a meta-algorithm-base algorithm abstraction that can work with general classes of…
We study the kernelized bandit problem, that involves designing an adaptive strategy for querying a noisy zeroth-order-oracle to efficiently learn about the optimizer of an unknown function $f$ with a norm bounded by $M<\infty$ in a…
Bayesian optimization devolves the global optimization of a costly objective function to the global optimization of a sequence of acquisition functions. This inner-loop optimization can be catastrophically difficult if it involves posterior…
Active policy search combines the trial-and-error methodology from policy search with Bayesian optimization to actively find the optimal policy. First, policy search is a type of reinforcement learning which has become very popular for…
We introduce a new stochastic smoothing perspective to study adversarial contextual bandit problems. We propose a general algorithm template that represents random perturbation based algorithms and identify several perturbation…
We revisit the classic regret-minimization problem in the stochastic multi-armed bandit setting when the arm-distributions are allowed to be heavy-tailed. Regret minimization has been well studied in simpler settings of either bounded…
This paper is about index policies for minimizing (frequentist) regret in a stochastic multi-armed bandit model, inspired by a Bayesian view on the problem. Our main contribution is to prove that the Bayes-UCB algorithm, which relies on…
We develop a meta-learning framework for simple regret minimization in bandits. In this framework, a learning agent interacts with a sequence of bandit tasks, which are sampled i.i.d.\ from an unknown prior distribution, and learns its…
We study the problem of causal discovery through targeted interventions. Starting from few observational measurements, we follow a Bayesian active learning approach to perform those experiments which, in expectation with respect to the…
We analyze the minimax regret of the adversarial bandit convex optimization problem. Focusing on the one-dimensional case, we prove that the minimax regret is $\widetilde\Theta(\sqrt{T})$ and partially resolve a decade-old open problem. Our…
We are interested in a framework of online learning with kernels for low-dimensional but large-scale and potentially adversarial datasets. We study the computational and theoretical performance of online variations of kernel Ridge…
We consider online convex optimization with a zero-order oracle feedback. In particular, the decision maker does not know the explicit representation of the time-varying cost functions, or their gradients. At each time step, she observes…
Bayesian optimization has recently emerged as a popular method for the sample-efficient optimization of expensive black-box functions. However, the application to high-dimensional problems with several thousand observations remains…