Related papers: On the Suboptimality of GP-UCB under Polynomial Ef…
The regret lower bound of Lai and Robbins (1985), the gold standard for checking optimality of bandit algorithms, considers arm size fixed as sample size goes to infinity. We show that when arm size increases polynomially with sample size,…
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…
This paper studies the safe reinforcement learning problem formulated as an episodic finite-horizon tabular constrained Markov decision process with an unknown transition kernel and stochastic reward and cost functions. We propose a…
In this paper, we consider the multi-armed bandit problem with high-dimensional features. First, we prove a minimax lower bound, $\mathcal{O}\big((\log d)^{\frac{\alpha+1}{2}}T^{\frac{1-\alpha}{2}}+\log T\big)$, for the cumulative regret,…
This paper investigates the problem of efficient constrained global optimization of hybrid models that are a composition of a known white-box function and an expensive multi-output black-box function subject to noisy observations, which…
Efficient global optimization (EGO) is one of the most widely used noise-free Bayesian optimization algorithms.It comprises the Gaussian process (GP) surrogate model and expected improvement (EI) acquisition function. In practice, when EGO…
We tackle the problem of online reward maximisation over a large finite set of actions described by their contexts. We focus on the case when the number of actions is too big to sample all of them even once. However we assume that we have…
In this work, we address the open problem of finding low-complexity near-optimal multi-armed bandit algorithms for sequential decision making problems. Existing bandit algorithms are either sub-optimal and computationally simple (e.g.,…
We consider the problem of sequentially maximising an unknown function over a set of actions while ensuring that every sampled point has a function value below a given safety threshold. We model the function using kernel-based and Gaussian…
In practical conjugate gradient (CG) computations it is important to monitor the quality of the approximate solution to $Ax=b$ so that the CG algorithm can be stopped when the required accuracy is reached. The relevant convergence…
Gaussian process (GP) bandits provide a powerful framework for performing blackbox optimization of unknown functions. The characteristics of the unknown function depend heavily on the assumed GP prior. Most work in the literature assume…
We motivate and analyse a new Tree Search algorithm, GPTS, based on recent theoretical advances in the use of Gaussian Processes for Bandit problems. We consider tree paths as arms and we assume the target/reward function is drawn from a GP…
We study the impact of sharing exploration in multi-armed bandits in a grouped setting where a set of groups have overlapping feasible action sets [Baek and Farias '24]. In this grouped bandit setting, groups share reward observations, and…
In this paper, we investigate the problem of \textit{episodic reinforcement learning} with quantum oracles for state evolution. To this end, we propose an \textit{Upper Confidence Bound} (UCB) based quantum algorithmic framework to…
We study the problem of preferential Bayesian optimization (BO), where we aim to optimize a black-box function with only preference feedback over a pair of candidate solutions. Inspired by the likelihood ratio idea, we construct a…
Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) is arguably the most commonly used method for linear multi-arm bandit problems. While conceptually and computationally simple, this method highly relies on the confidence bounds, failing to strike the optimal…
Local Bayesian optimization is a promising practical approach to solve the high dimensional black-box function optimization problem. Among them is the approximated gradient class of methods, which implements a strategy similar to gradient…
By leveraging the representation power of deep neural networks, neural upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms have shown success in contextual bandits. To further balance the exploration and exploitation, we propose…
We study how to make decisions that minimize Bayesian regret in offline linear bandits. Prior work suggests that one must take actions with maximum lower confidence bound (LCB) on their reward. We argue that the reliance on LCB is…
We study the Gaussian process (GP) bandit problem, whose goal is to minimize regret under an unknown reward function lying in some reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). The maximum posterior variance analysis is vital in analyzing…