Related papers: UCB Exploration for Fixed-Budget Bayesian Best Arm…

Most bandit algorithm designs are purely theoretical. Therefore, they have strong regret guarantees, but also are often too conservative in practice. In this work, we pioneer the idea of algorithm design by minimizing the empirical Bayes…

This paper investigates the best arm identification (BAI) problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits in the fixed confidence setting. The general class of the exponential family of bandits is considered. The existing algorithms for the…

In this paper, we consider a best action identification problem in the stochastic linear bandit setup with a fixed confident constraint. In the considered best action identification problem, instead of minimizing the accumulative regret as…

We consider a multi-armed bandit problem in which a set of arms is registered by each agent, and the agent receives reward when its arm is selected. An agent might strategically submit more arms with replications, which can bring more…

We study fixed budget constrained best-arm identification in grouped bandits, where each arm consists of multiple independent attributes with stochastic rewards. An arm is considered feasible only if all its attributes' means are above a…

Learning good interventions in a causal graph can be modelled as a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with side-information. First, we study this problem when interventions are more expensive than observations and a budget is specified.…

We study a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting where arms are partitioned into known clusters, such that the mean rewards of arms within a cluster differ by at most a known threshold. While the clustering structure is known a priori, the…

We consider the combinatorial volatile Gaussian process (GP) semi-bandit problem. Each round, an agent is provided a set of available base arms and must select a subset of them to maximize the long-term cumulative reward. We study the…

This paper proposes near-optimal algorithms for the pure-exploration linear bandit problem in the fixed confidence and fixed budget settings. Leveraging ideas from the theory of suprema of empirical processes, we provide an algorithm whose…

We propose a novel modification of the standard upper confidence bound (UCB) method for the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem which tunes the confidence bound of a given bandit based on its distance to others. Our UCB distance…

We study the robust best-arm identification problem (RBAI) in the case of linear rewards. The primary objective is to identify a near-optimal robust arm, which involves selecting arms at every round and assessing their robustness by…

This paper studies the fixed-confidence best arm identification (BAI) problem in the bandit framework in the canonical single-parameter exponential models. For this problem, many policies have been proposed, but most of them require solving…

Lai and Robbins (1985) and Lai (1987) provided efficient parametric solutions to the multi-armed bandit problem, showing that arm allocation via upper confidence bounds (UCB) achieves minimum regret. These bounds are constructed from the…

We study a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where an agent is granted a free exploration budget before regret accumulates, a setting not captured by the classic regret minimization or pure exploration paradigms. The goal is to design…

In this paper, we introduce Ballooning Multi-Armed Bandits (BL-MAB), a novel extension of the classical stochastic MAB model. In the BL-MAB model, the set of available arms grows (or balloons) over time. In contrast to the classical MAB…

In this paper, we study a best arm identification problem with dual objects. In addition to the classic reward, each arm is associated with a cost distribution and the goal is to identify the largest reward arm using the minimum expected…

In this study, we propose a new method for constructing UCB-type algorithms for stochastic multi-armed bandits based on general convex optimization methods with an inexact oracle. We derive the regret bounds corresponding to the convergence…

Bayesian optimisation requires fitting a Gaussian process model, which in turn requires specifying prior on the unknown black-box function -- most of the theoretical literature assumes this prior is known. However, it is common to have more…

We study an important variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, which takes penalization into consideration. Instead of directly maximizing cumulative expected reward, we need to balance between the total reward and…

We consider the Lipschitz bandit optimization problem with an emphasis on practical efficiency. Although there is rich literature on regret analysis of this type of problem, e.g., [Kleinberg et al. 2008, Bubeck et al. 2011, Slivkins 2014],…