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Cooperative behavior is prevalent in both human society and nature. Understanding the emergence and maintenance of cooperation among self-interested individuals remains a significant challenge in evolutionary biology and social sciences.…
We consider a class of restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problems with unknown arm dynamics. At each time, a player chooses an arm out of N arms to play, referred to as an active arm, and receives a random reward from a finite set of…
The multi-armed bandit problem is a core framework for sequential decision-making under uncertainty, but classical algorithms often fail in environments with hidden, time-varying states that confound reward estimation and optimal action…
Decision-making under uncertainty is a fundamental problem encountered frequently and can be formulated as a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem. In the problem, the learner interacts with an environment by choosing an action at each…
We consider the best-arm identification problem in multi-armed bandits, which focuses purely on exploration. A player is given a fixed budget to explore a finite set of arms, and the rewards of each arm are drawn independently from a fixed,…
We study a multi-armed bandit problem where the rewards exhibit regime switching. Specifically, the distributions of the random rewards generated from all arms are modulated by a common underlying state modeled as a finite-state Markov…
Motivated by emerging applications such as live-streaming e-commerce, promotions and recommendations, we introduce and solve a general class of non-stationary multi-armed bandit problems that have the following two features: (i) the…
We study a strategic version of the multi-armed bandit problem, where each arm is an individual strategic agent and we, the principal, pull one arm each round. When pulled, the arm receives some private reward $v_a$ and can choose an amount…
Restless multi-armed bandits (RMAB) play a central role in modeling sequential decision making problems under an instantaneous activation constraint that at most B arms can be activated at any decision epoch. Each restless arm is endowed…
Restless multi-armed bandits (RMAB) have been widely used to model sequential decision making problems with constraints. The decision maker (DM) aims to maximize the expected total reward over an infinite horizon under an "instantaneous…
We introduce the safe linear stochastic bandit framework---a generalization of linear stochastic bandits---where, in each stage, the learner is required to select an arm with an expected reward that is no less than a predetermined (safe)…
We consider a multi-armed bandit problem where the decision maker can explore and exploit different arms at every round. The exploited arm adds to the decision maker's cumulative reward (without necessarily observing the reward) while the…
The primary goal of my Ph.D. study is to develop provably efficient and practical algorithms for data-driven sequential decision-making under uncertainty. My work focuses on reinforcement learning (RL), multi-armed bandits, and their…
Motivated by recommendation problems in music streaming platforms, we propose a nonstationary stochastic bandit model in which the expected reward of an arm depends on the number of rounds that have passed since the arm was last pulled.…
We study the multi-armed bandit problem where the rewards are realizations of general non-stationary stochastic processes, a setting that generalizes many existing lines of work and analyses. In particular, we present a theoretical analysis…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) based methods have seen their paramount successes in solving serial decision-making and control problems in recent years. For conventional RL formulations, Markov Decision Process (MDP) and state-action-value…
Time-constrained decision processes have been ubiquitous in many fundamental applications in physics, biology and computer science. Recently, restart strategies have gained significant attention for boosting the efficiency of…
We consider the thresholding bandit problem, whose goal is to find arms of mean rewards above a given threshold $\theta$, with a fixed budget of $T$ trials. We introduce LSA, a new, simple and anytime algorithm that aims to minimize the…
We propose a model for learning with bandit feedback while accounting for deterministically evolving and unobservable states that we call Bandits with Deterministically Evolving States ($B$-$DES$). The workhorse applications of our model…
Deep Reinforcement Learning has been shown to be very successful in complex games, e.g. Atari or Go. These games have clearly defined rules, and hence allow simulation. In many practical applications, however, interactions with the…