Related papers: Nearly-tight Approximation Guarantees for the Impr…
In this paper, we consider a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, MAB with cost subsidy, which models many real-life applications where the learning agent has to pay to select an arm and is concerned about optimizing…
We study the problem of $K$-armed bandits with reward distributions belonging to a one-parameter exponential distribution family. In the literature, several criteria have been proposed to evaluate the performance of such algorithms,…
Given a multi-armed bandit problem it may be desirable to achieve a smaller-than-usual worst-case regret for some special actions. I show that the price for such unbalanced worst-case regret guarantees is rather high. Specifically, if an…
We study a novel multi-armed bandit problem that models the challenge faced by a company wishing to explore new strategies to maximize revenue whilst simultaneously maintaining their revenue above a fixed baseline, uniformly over time.…
We consider a combinatorial multi-armed bandit problem for maximum value reward function under maximum value and index feedback. This is a new feedback structure that lies in between commonly studied semi-bandit and full-bandit feedback…
In this paper, we consider the problem of sleeping bandits with stochastic action sets and adversarial rewards. In this setting, in contrast to most work in bandits, the actions may not be available at all times. For instance, some products…
We give a near-optimal sample-pass trade-off for pure exploration in multi-armed bandits (MABs) via multi-pass streaming algorithms: any streaming algorithm with sublinear memory that uses the optimal sample complexity of…
In this paper, we consider the problem of multi-armed bandits with a large, possibly infinite number of correlated arms. We assume that the arms have Bernoulli distributed rewards, independent across time, where the probabilities of success…
In this work, we improve on the upper and lower bounds for the regret of online learning with strongly observable undirected feedback graphs. The best known upper bound for this problem is $\mathcal{O}\bigl(\sqrt{\alpha T\ln K}\bigr)$,…
We study the combinatorial semi-bandit problem where an agent selects a subset of base arms and receives individual feedback. While this generalizes the classical multi-armed bandit and has broad applicability, its scalability is limited by…
We address the problem of identifying the optimal policy with a fixed confidence level in a multi-armed bandit setup, when \emph{the arms are subject to linear constraints}. Unlike the standard best-arm identification problem which is well…
An online reinforcement learning algorithm is anytime if it does not need to know in advance the horizon T of the experiment. A well-known technique to obtain an anytime algorithm from any non-anytime algorithm is the "Doubling Trick". In…
Contextual dueling bandit is used to model the bandit problems, where a learner's goal is to find the best arm for a given context using observed noisy human preference feedback over the selected arms for the past contexts. However,…
We study the problem of corralling stochastic bandit algorithms, that is combining multiple bandit algorithms designed for a stochastic environment, with the goal of devising a corralling algorithm that performs almost as well as the best…
We propose $\tt RandUCB$, a bandit strategy that builds on theoretically derived confidence intervals similar to upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms, but akin to Thompson sampling (TS), it uses randomization to trade off exploration and…
The combinatorial stochastic semi-bandit problem is an extension of the classical multi-armed bandit problem in which an algorithm pulls more than one arm at each stage and the rewards of all pulled arms are revealed. One difference with…
We consider a bandit problem where the buget is smaller than the number of arms, which may be infinite. In this regime, the usual objective in the literature is to minimize simple regret. To analyze broad classes of distributions with…
We introduce a novel extension of the canonical multi-armed bandit problem that incorporates an additional strategic innovation: abstention. In this enhanced framework, the agent is not only tasked with selecting an arm at each time step,…
This paper investigates the problem of best arm identification in $\textit{contaminated}$ stochastic multi-arm bandits. In this setting, the rewards obtained from any arm are replaced by samples from an adversarial model with probability…
We study best arm identification in a variant of the multi-armed bandit problem where the learner has limited precision in arm selection. The learner can only sample arms via certain exploration bundles, which we refer to as boxes. In…