Related papers: DOPL: Direct Online Preference Learning for Restle…
In the classic Bayesian restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problem, there are $N$ arms, with rewards on all arms evolving at each time as Markov chains with known parameters. A player seeks to activate $K \geq 1$ arms at each time in order…
We study the $K$-armed contextual dueling bandit problem, a sequential decision making setting in which the learner uses contextual information to make two decisions, but only observes \emph{preference-based feedback} suggesting that one…
In this paper, we propose a new multi-objective contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem with two objectives, where one of the objectives dominates the other objective. Unlike single-objective MAB problems in which the learner obtains a…
Socially aware robot navigation, where a robot is required to optimize its trajectory to maintain comfortable and compliant spatial interactions with humans in addition to reaching its goal without collisions, is a fundamental yet…
This paper addresses an important class of restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problems that finds broad application in operations research, stochastic optimization, and reinforcement learning. There are $N$ independent Markov processes that…
We consider the query recommendation problem in closed loop interactive learning settings like online information gathering and exploratory analytics. The problem can be naturally modelled using the Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) framework with…
Fast changing states or volatile environments pose a significant challenge to online optimization, which needs to perform rapid adaptation under limited observation. In this paper, we give query and regret optimal bandit algorithms under…
In this paper, we study the multi-objective bandits (MOB) problem, where a learner repeatedly selects one arm to play and then receives a reward vector consisting of multiple objectives. MOB has found many real-world applications as varied…
We describe and study a model for an Automated Online Recommendation System (AORS) in which a user's preferences can be time-dependent and can also depend on the history of past recommendations and play-outs. The three key features of the…
Personalized recommender systems suffuse modern life, shaping what media we read and what products we consume. Algorithms powering such systems tend to consist of supervised learning-based heuristics, such as latent factor models with a…
Bandit algorithms are guaranteed to solve diverse sequential decision-making problems, provided that a sufficient exploration budget is available. However, learning from scratch is often too costly for personalization tasks where a single…
The deployment of Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) has become commonplace in many economic applications. However, regret guarantees for even state-of-the-art linear bandit algorithms (such as Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty Linear bandit…
Reward-biased maximum likelihood estimation (RBMLE) is a classic principle in the adaptive control literature for tackling explore-exploit trade-offs. This paper studies the stochastic contextual bandit problem with general bounded reward…
We study the effect of persistence of engagement on learning in a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting. In advertising and recommendation systems, repetition effect includes a wear-in period, where the user's propensity to reward the…
Inspired by the Reward-Biased Maximum Likelihood Estimate method of adaptive control, we propose RBMLE -- a novel family of learning algorithms for stochastic multi-armed bandits (SMABs). For a broad range of SMABs including both the…
Contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms have been shown promising for maximizing cumulative rewards in sequential decision tasks such as news article recommendation systems, web page ad placement algorithms, and mobile health.…
Online task scheduling serves an integral role for task-intensive applications in cloud computing and crowdsourcing. Optimal scheduling can enhance system performance, typically measured by the reward-to-cost ratio, under some task arrival…
Workers participating in a crowdsourcing platform can have a wide range of abilities and interests. An important problem in crowdsourcing is the task recommendation problem, in which tasks that best match a particular worker's preferences…
We study the piecewise-stationary restless multi-armed bandit (PS-RMAB) problem, where each arm evolves as a Markov chain but \emph{mean rewards may change across unknown segments}. To address the resulting exploration--detection delay…
This paper investigates the problem of regret minimization for multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems with local differential privacy (LDP) guarantee. In stochastic bandit systems, the rewards may refer to the users' activities, which may…