Related papers: Inference with the Upper Confidence Bound Algorith…
The combinatorial multi-armed bandit model is designed to maximize cumulative rewards in the presence of uncertainty by activating a subset of arms in each round. This paper is inspired by two critical applications in wireless networks,…
We study the problem of best-arm identification with fixed confidence in stochastic linear bandits. The objective is to identify the best arm with a given level of certainty while minimizing the sampling budget. We devise a simple algorithm…
We study a variant of the classical multi-armed bandit problem (MABP) which we call as Multi-Armed Bandits with dependent arms. More specifically, multiple arms are grouped together to form a cluster, and the reward distributions of arms…
We consider the contextual bandit problem on general action and context spaces, where the learner's rewards depend on their selected actions and an observable context. This generalizes the standard multi-armed bandit to the case where side…
Berry et al. (1997) initiated the development of the infinite arms bandit problem. They derived a regret lower bound of all allocation strategies for Bernoulli rewards with uniform priors, and proposed strategies based on success runs.…
In a fixed-confidence pure exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits, an algorithm iteratively samples arms and should stop as early as possible and return the correct answer to a query about the arms distributions. We are…
We design and analyze CascadeBAI, an algorithm for finding the best set of $K$ items, also called an arm, within the framework of cascading bandits. An upper bound on the time complexity of CascadeBAI is derived by overcoming a crucial…
Multi-armed Bandit (MAB) algorithms identify the best arm among multiple arms via exploration-exploitation trade-off without prior knowledge of arm statistics. Their usefulness in wireless radio, IoT, and robotics demand deployment on edge…
Motivated by real-world applications that necessitate responsible experimentation, we introduce the problem of best arm identification (BAI) with minimal regret. This innovative variant of the multi-armed bandit problem elegantly…
We study online fair division when there are a finite number of item types and the player values for the items are drawn randomly from distributions with unknown means. In this setting, a sequence of indivisible items arrives according to a…
The knowledge gradient (KG) algorithm is a popular and effective algorithm for the best arm identification (BAI) problem. Due to the complex calculation of KG, theoretical analysis of this algorithm is difficult, and existing results are…
Model misspecification is a major consideration in applications of statistical methods and machine learning. However, it is often neglected in contextual bandits. This paper studies a common form of misspecification, an inter-arm…
The multi-armed bandit formalism has been extensively studied under various attack models, in which an adversary can modify the reward revealed to the player. Previous studies focused on scenarios where the attack value either is bounded at…
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…
We lay the foundations of a non-parametric theory of best-arm identification in multi-armed bandits with a fixed budget T. We consider general, possibly non-parametric, models D for distributions over the arms; an overarching example is the…
In statistical inference, confidence set procedures are typically evaluated based on their validity and width properties. Even when procedures achieve rate-optimal widths, confidence sets can still be excessively wide in practice due to…
We establish strong laws of large numbers and central limit theorems for the regret of two of the most popular bandit algorithms: Thompson sampling and UCB. Here, our characterizations of the regret distribution complement the…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems are widely studied in fields of operations research, stochastic optimization, and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we consider the classical MAB model with heavy-tailed reward distributions and…
We define a general framework for a large class of combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) problems, where subsets of base arms with unknown distributions form super arms. In each round, a super arm is played and the base arms contained in…
Motivated by modern applications, such as online advertisement and recommender systems, we study the top-$k$ extreme contextual bandits problem, where the total number of arms can be enormous, and the learner is allowed to select $k$ arms…