Related papers: Optimistic Information Directed Sampling
We consider the classic online learning and stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems, when at each step, the online policy can probe and find out which of a small number ($k$) of choices has better reward (or loss) before making its…
Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the strategy deployed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. Further, often we have only partial information on the state of the system. We study the…
Bandit convex optimization (BCO) is a fundamental online learning framework with partial feedback, where the learner observes only the loss incurred at the chosen decision point in each round. In this work, we investigate whether optimistic…
We present a new recommendation setting for picking out two items from a given set to be highlighted to a user, based on contextual input. These two items are presented to a user who chooses one of them, possibly stochastically, with a bias…
We present efficient algorithms for the problem of contextual bandits with i.i.d. covariates, an arbitrary sequence of rewards, and an arbitrary class of policies. Our algorithm BISTRO requires d calls to the empirical risk minimization…
We study the problem of online learning and online regret minimization when samples are drawn from a general unknown non-stationary process. We introduce the concept of a dynamic changing process with cost $K$, where the conditional…
The Adversarial Markov Decision Process (AMDP) is a learning framework that deals with unknown and varying tasks in decision-making applications like robotics and recommendation systems. A major limitation of the AMDP formalism, however, is…
We study the linear stochastic bandit problem, relaxing the standard i.i.d. assumption on the observation noise. As an alternative to this restrictive assumption, we allow the noise terms across rounds to be sub-Gaussian but interdependent,…
This paper considers a variant of the online paging problem, where the online algorithm has access to multiple predictors, each producing a sequence of predictions for the page arrival times. The predictors may have occasional prediction…
In online learning, the data is provided in a sequential order, and the goal of the learner is to make online decisions to minimize overall regrets. This note is concerned with continuous-time models and algorithms for several online…
We study budget-constrained contextual bandits with adversarial contexts, where each action yields a random reward and incurs a random cost. We adopt the standard realizability assumption: conditioned on the observed context, rewards and…
Stochastic linear bandits are a fundamental model for sequential decision making, where an agent selects a vector-valued action and receives a noisy reward with expected value given by an unknown linear function. Although well studied in…
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…
We propose the first reduction-based approach to obtaining long-term memory guarantees for online learning in the sense of Bousquet and Warmuth, 2002, by reducing the problem to achieving typical switching regret. Specifically, for the…
Thompson Sampling is one of the oldest heuristics for multi-armed bandit problems. It is a randomized algorithm based on Bayesian ideas, and has recently generated significant interest after several studies demonstrated it to have better…
Multi-armed bandit problems are the predominant theoretical model of exploration-exploitation tradeoffs in learning, and they have countless applications ranging from medical trials, to communication networks, to Web search and advertising.…
Transfer learning seeks to accelerate sequential decision-making by leveraging offline data from related agents. However, data from heterogeneous sources that differ in observed features, distributions, or unobserved confounders often…
We present a new algorithm for the contextual bandit learning problem, where the learner repeatedly takes one of $K$ actions in response to the observed context, and observes the reward only for that chosen action. Our method assumes access…
This paper is motivated by recent research in the $d$-dimensional stochastic linear bandit literature, which has revealed an unsettling discrepancy: algorithms like Thompson sampling and Greedy demonstrate promising empirical performance,…
The information ratio offers an approach to assessing the efficacy with which an agent balances between exploration and exploitation. Originally, this was defined to be the ratio between squared expected regret and the mutual information…