Related papers: A Batch Sequential Halving Algorithm without Perfo…

In multi-armed bandits, the tasks of reward maximization and pure exploration are often at odds with each other. The former focuses on exploiting arms with the highest means, while the latter may require constant exploration across all…

We study the best-arm identification problem in multi-armed bandits with stochastic, potentially private rewards, when the goal is to identify the arm with the highest quantile at a fixed, prescribed level. First, we propose a (non-private)…

We propose a sequential optimizing betting strategy in the multi-dimensional bounded forecasting game in the framework of game-theoretic probability of Shafer and Vovk (2001). By studying the asymptotic behavior of its capital process, we…

The piecewise-stationary bandit problem is an important variant of the multi-armed bandit problem that further considers abrupt changes in the reward distributions. The main theme of the problem is the trade-off between exploration for…

We propose a novel algorithm for multi-player multi-armed bandits without collision sensing information. Our algorithm circumvents two problems shared by all state-of-the-art algorithms: it does not need as an input a lower bound on the…

Certifying whether an arbitrary quantum system is entangled or not, is, in general, an NP-hard problem. Though various necessary and sufficient conditions have already been explored in this regard for lower dimensional systems, it is hard…

Training deep neural networks (DNNs) used in modern machine learning is computationally expensive. Machine learning scientists, therefore, rely on stochastic first-order methods for training, coupled with significant hand-tuning, to obtain…

We study the real-valued combinatorial pure exploration of the multi-armed bandit in the fixed-budget setting. We first introduce the Combinatorial Successive Asign (CSA) algorithm, which is the first algorithm that can identify the best…

This paper presents an efficient algorithm to solve the sleeping bandit with multiple plays problem in the context of an online recommendation system. The problem involves bounded, adversarial loss and unknown i.i.d. distributions for arm…

We consider a multi-armed bandit setting with finitely many arms, in which each arm yields an $M$-dimensional vector reward upon selection. We assume that the reward of each dimension (a.k.a. {\em objective}) is generated independently of…

Taking advantage of contextual information can potentially boost the performance of recommender systems. In the era of big data, such side information often has several dimensions. Thus, developing decision-making algorithms to cope with…

What can an agent learn in a stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem from a dataset that contains just a single sample for each arm? Surprisingly, in this work, we demonstrate that even in such a data-starved setting it may still be…

Performance of machine learning algorithms depends critically on identifying a good set of hyperparameters. While recent approaches use Bayesian optimization to adaptively select configurations, we focus on speeding up random search through…

The advantages of evolutionary algorithms with respect to traditional methods have been greatly discussed in the literature. While particle swarm optimizers share such advantages, they outperform evolutionary algorithms in that they require…

BatchNorm is a critical building block in modern convolutional neural networks. Its unique property of operating on "batches" instead of individual samples introduces significantly different behaviors from most other operations in deep…

This paper studies batched bandit learning problems for nondegenerate functions. We introduce an algorithm that solves the batched bandit problem for nondegenerate functions near-optimally. More specifically, we introduce an algorithm,…

The question of how to parallelize the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method has received much attention in the literature. In this paper, we focus instead on batch methods that use a sizeable fraction of the training set at each…

We study the problem of best-arm identification with fixed budget in stochastic multi-armed bandits with Bernoulli rewards. For the problem with two arms, also known as the A/B testing problem, we prove that there is no algorithm that (i)…

Batch Normalization (BN) is one of the most widely used techniques in Deep Learning field. But its performance can awfully degrade with insufficient batch size. This weakness limits the usage of BN on many computer vision tasks like…

Conventional wisdom holds that large-batch training is fundamentally incompatible with Reinforcement Learning (RL) - beyond a modest threshold, increasing batch sizes typically yields diminishing returns or performance degradation due to…