Related papers: Little Exploration is All You Need
We investigate two perturbation approaches to overcome conservatism that optimism based algorithms chronically suffer from in practice. The first approach replaces optimism with a simple randomization when using confidence sets. The second…
Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) method is arguably the most celebrated one used in online decision making with partial information feedback. Existing techniques for constructing confidence bounds are typically built upon various concentration…
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…
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…
The exploration-exploitation dilemma has been an intriguing and unsolved problem within the framework of reinforcement learning. "Optimism in the face of uncertainty" and model building play central roles in advanced exploration methods.…
In this paper, we consider stochastic multi-armed bandits (MABs) with heavy-tailed rewards, whose $p$-th moment is bounded by a constant $\nu_{p}$ for $1<p\leq2$. First, we propose a novel robust estimator which does not require $\nu_{p}$…
We advance the study of incentivized bandit exploration, in which arm choices are viewed as recommendations and are required to be Bayesian incentive compatible. Recent work has shown under certain independence assumptions that after…
In this paper we propose the Augmented-UCB (AugUCB) algorithm for a fixed-budget version of the thresholding bandit problem (TBP), where the objective is to identify a set of arms whose quality is above a threshold. A key feature of AugUCB…
Contextual multi-armed bandits (CMAB) have been widely used for learning to filter and prioritize information according to a user's interest. In this work, we analyze top-K ranking under the CMAB framework where the top-K arms are chosen…
We present a new type of acquisition functions for online decision making in multi-armed and contextual bandit problems with extreme payoffs. Specifically, we model the payoff function as a Gaussian process and formulate a novel type of…
We consider the combinatorial bandits problem, where at each time step, the online learner selects a size-$k$ subset $s$ from the arms set $\mathcal{A}$, where $\left|\mathcal{A}\right| = n$, and observes a stochastic reward of each arm in…
One principled approach for provably efficient exploration is incorporating the upper confidence bound (UCB) into the value function as a bonus. However, UCB is specified to deal with linear and tabular settings and is incompatible with…
The Multi-armed bandit offer the advantage to learn and exploit the already learnt knowledge at the same time. This capability allows this approach to be applied in different domains, going from clinical trials where the goal is…
This paper considers stochastic linear bandits with general nonlinear constraints. The objective is to maximize the expected cumulative reward over horizon $T$ subject to a set of constraints in each round $\tau\leq T$. We propose a…
This paper studies regret minimization in a multi-armed bandit. It is well known that side information, such as the prior distribution of arm means in Thompson sampling, can improve the statistical efficiency of the bandit algorithm. While…
We study the explore-exploit tradeoff in distributed cooperative decision-making using the context of the multiarmed bandit (MAB) problem. For the distributed cooperative MAB problem, we design the cooperative UCB algorithm that comprises…
Multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms have achieved significant success in sequential decision-making applications, under the premise that humans perfectly implement the recommended policy. However, existing methods often overlook the crucial…
In this paper, we study an interesting combination of sleeping and combinatorial stochastic bandits. In the mixed model studied here, at each discrete time instant, an arbitrary \emph{availability set} is generated from a fixed set of…
E-commerce sites strive to provide users the most timely relevant information in order to reduce shopping frictions and increase customer satisfaction. Multi armed bandit models (MAB) as a type of adaptive optimization algorithms provide…
Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) algorithms are widely used in recommender systems that require continuous, incremental learning. A core aspect of MABs is the exploration-exploitation trade-off: choosing between exploiting items likely to be…