Related papers: State-Separated SARSA: A Practical Sequential Deci…

Multi-armed bandits (MAB) are commonly used in sequential online decision-making when the reward of each decision is an unknown random variable. In practice however, the typical goal of maximizing total reward may be less important than…

The multi-armed bandit(MAB) is a classical sequential decision problem. Most work requires assumptions about the reward distribution (e.g., bounded), while practitioners may have difficulty obtaining information about these distributions to…

In this paper, we study Contextual Unsupervised Sequential Selection (USS), a new variant of the stochastic contextual bandits problem where the loss of an arm cannot be inferred from the observed feedback. In our setup, arms are associated…

Many algorithms for data analysis exist, especially for classification problems. To solve a data analysis problem, a proper algorithm should be chosen, and also its hyperparameters should be selected. In this paper, we present a new method…

We introduce a dynamic neural algorithm called Dynamic Neural (DN) SARSA(\lambda) for learning a behavioral sequence from delayed reward. DN-SARSA(\lambda) combines Dynamic Field Theory models of behavioral sequence representation,…

In this paper, we study the stochastic combinatorial multi-armed bandit problem under semi-bandit feedback. While much work has been done on algorithms that optimize the expected reward for linear as well as some general reward functions,…

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

In this paper we consider the contextual multi-armed bandit problem for linear payoffs under a risk-averse criterion. At each round, contexts are revealed for each arm, and the decision maker chooses one arm to pull and receives the…

In this paper we propose the first multi-armed bandit algorithm based on re-sampling that achieves asymptotically optimal regret simultaneously for different families of arms (namely Bernoulli, Gaussian and Poisson distributions). Unlike…

For traffic routing platforms, the choice of which route to recommend to a user depends on the congestion on these routes -- indeed, an individual's utility depends on the number of people using the recommended route at that instance.…

Top-k Combinatorial Bandits generalize multi-armed bandits, where at each round any subset of $k$ out of $n$ arms may be chosen and the sum of the rewards is gained. We address the full-bandit feedback, in which the agent observes only the…

Stochastic rising rested bandit (SRRB) is a setting where the arms' expected rewards increase as they are pulled. It models scenarios in which the performances of the different options grow as an effect of an underlying learning process…

We consider a multi-armed bandit framework where the rewards obtained by pulling different arms are correlated. We develop a unified approach to leverage these reward correlations and present fundamental generalizations of classic bandit…

In this paper, we introduce the notion of replicable policies in the context of stochastic bandits, one of the canonical problems in interactive learning. A policy in the bandit environment is called replicable if it pulls, with high…

We consider a novel stochastic multi-armed bandit setting, where playing an arm makes it unavailable for a fixed number of time slots thereafter. This models situations where reusing an arm too often is undesirable (e.g. making the same…

Reward shaping (RS) is a powerful method in reinforcement learning (RL) for overcoming the problem of sparse or uninformative rewards. However, RS typically relies on manually engineered shaping-reward functions whose construction is…

We introduce the "inverse bandit" problem of estimating the rewards of a multi-armed bandit instance from observing the learning process of a low-regret demonstrator. Existing approaches to the related problem of inverse reinforcement…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has increasingly been applied to solve real-world planning problems, with progress in handling large state spaces and time horizons. However, a key bottleneck in many domains is that RL methods cannot accommodate…

Motivated by a natural problem in online model selection with bandit information, we introduce and analyze a best arm identification problem in the rested bandit setting, wherein arm expected losses decrease with the number of times the arm…

Classical multi-armed bandit problems use the expected value of an arm as a metric to evaluate its goodness. However, the expected value is a risk-neutral metric. In many applications like finance, one is interested in balancing the…