Related papers: Bayesian Analysis of Combinatorial Gaussian Proces…
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…
In this paper, we consider the problem of black-box optimization using Gaussian Process (GP) bandit optimization with a small number of batches. Assuming the unknown function has a low norm in the Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS), we…
In combinatorial semi-bandits, a learner repeatedly selects from a combinatorial decision set of arms, receives the realized sum of rewards, and observes the rewards of the individual selected arms as feedback. In this paper, we extend this…
Conservative mechanism is a desirable property in decision-making problems which balance the tradeoff between the exploration and exploitation. We propose the novel \emph{conservative contextual combinatorial cascading bandit…
We present a formal model of human decision-making in explore-exploit tasks using the context of multi-armed bandit problems, where the decision-maker must choose among multiple options with uncertain rewards. We address the standard…
Bayesian Optimization is critically vulnerable to extreme outliers. Existing provably robust methods typically assume a bounded cumulative corruption budget, which makes them defenseless against even a single corruption of sufficient…
In sequential decision-making scenarios i.e., mobile health recommendation systems revenue management contextual multi-armed bandit algorithms have garnered attention for their performance. But most of the existing algorithms are built on…
In this paper, we consider the problem of stochastic optimization under a bandit feedback model. We generalize the GP-UCB algorithm [Srinivas and al., 2012] to arbitrary kernels and search spaces. To do so, we use a notion of localized…
We study a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, where at each time step, the player observes an independently sampled context that determines the arms' mean rewards. However, playing an arm blocks it (across all contexts) for a…
I analyse the frequentist regret of the famous Gittins index strategy for multi-armed bandits with Gaussian noise and a finite horizon. Remarkably it turns out that this approach leads to finite-time regret guarantees comparable to those…
This paper analyses 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 widely used Bayesian optimization method, Gaussian process Thompson sampling (GP-TS), under the assumption that the objective function is a sample path from a GP. Compared with the GP upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) with…
The multi-armed bandit(MAB) problem is a simple yet powerful framework that has been extensively studied in the context of decision-making under uncertainty. In many real-world applications, such as robotic applications, selecting an arm…
We investigate a Bayesian $k$-armed bandit problem in the \emph{many-armed} regime, where $k \geq \sqrt{T}$ and $T$ represents the time horizon. Initially, and aligned with recent literature on many-armed bandit problems, we observe that…
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…
The design of personalized incentives or recommendations to improve user engagement is gaining prominence as digital platform providers continually emerge. We propose a multi-armed bandit framework for matching incentives to users, whose…
Bayesian optimization (BO) with Gaussian process (GP) surrogate models is a powerful black-box optimization method. Acquisition functions are a critical part of a BO algorithm as they determine how the new samples are selected. Some of the…
In the classic multi-armed bandits problem, the goal is to have a policy for dynamically operating arms that each yield stochastic rewards with unknown means. The key metric of interest is regret, defined as the gap between the expected…
In this paper, we study the combinatorial semi-bandits (CMAB) and focus on reducing the dependency of the batch-size $K$ in the regret bound, where $K$ is the total number of arms that can be pulled or triggered in each round. First, for…
We consider online sequential decision problems where an agent must balance exploration and exploitation. We derive a set of Bayesian `optimistic' policies which, in the stochastic multi-armed bandit case, includes the Thompson sampling…