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This paper considers a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem in which multiple mobile agents receive rewards by sampling from a collection of spatially dispersed stochastic processes, called bandits. The goal is to formulate a decentralized…
This paper studies bandit convex optimization in non-stationary environments with two-point feedback, using dynamic regret as the performance measure. We propose an algorithm based on bandit mirror descent that extends naturally to…
The principle of optimism in the face of uncertainty is one of the most widely used and successful ideas in multi-armed bandits and reinforcement learning. However, existing optimistic algorithms (primarily UCB and its variants) often…
We investigate two perturbation approaches to overcome conservatism that optimism based algorithms chronically suffer from in practice. The first approach replaces optimism with a simple randomization when using confidence sets. The second…
We address multi-armed bandits (MAB) where the objective is to maximize the cumulative reward under a probabilistic linear constraint. For a few real-world instances of this problem, constrained extensions of the well-known Thompson…
I present the first algorithm for stochastic finite-armed bandits that simultaneously enjoys order-optimal problem-dependent regret and worst-case regret. Besides the theoretical results, the new algorithm is simple, efficient and…
This work studies linear bandits under a new notion of gap-adjusted misspecification and is an extension of Liu et al. (2023). When the underlying reward function is not linear, existing linear bandits work usually relies on a uniform…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a foundational framework in sequential decision-making under uncertainty, extensively studied for its applications in areas such as clinical trials, online advertising, and resource allocation.…
Contextual bandits are a central framework for sequential decision-making, with applications ranging from recommendation systems to clinical trials. While nonparametric methods can flexibly model complex reward structures, they suffer from…
We propose randomized subspace gradient methods for high-dimensional constrained optimization. While there have been similarly purposed studies on unconstrained optimization problems, there have been few on constrained optimization problems…
We consider stochastic sequential learning problems where the learner can observe the \textit{average reward of several actions}. Such a setting is interesting in many applications involving monitoring and surveillance, where the set of the…
We study the linear bandit problem that accounts for partially observable features. Without proper handling, unobserved features can lead to linear regret in the decision horizon $T$, as their influence on rewards is unknown. To tackle this…
The general sequential decision-making problem, which includes Markov decision processes (MDPs) and partially observable MDPs (POMDPs) as special cases, aims at maximizing a cumulative reward by making a sequence of decisions based on a…
In this paper we propose and explore the k-Nearest Neighbour UCB algorithm for multi-armed bandits with covariates. We focus on a setting where the covariates are supported on a metric space of low intrinsic dimension, such as a manifold…
Modern optimization problems in scientific and engineering domains often rely on expensive black-box evaluations, such as those arising in physical simulations or deep learning pipelines, where gradient information is unavailable or…
We study the problem of infrequent exploration in linear bandits, addressing a significant yet overlooked gap between fully adaptive exploratory methods (e.g., UCB and Thompson Sampling), which explore potentially at every time step, and…
We study the tail behavior of regret in stochastic multi-armed bandits for algorithms that are asymptotically optimal in expectation. While minimizing expected regret is the classical objective, recent work shows that even such algorithms…
The safe linear bandit problem (SLB) is an online approach to linear programming with unknown objective and unknown roundwise constraints, under stochastic bandit feedback of rewards and safety risks of actions. We study the tradeoffs…
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],…
We propose the Bayes-UCBVI algorithm for reinforcement learning in tabular, stage-dependent, episodic Markov decision process: a natural extension of the Bayes-UCB algorithm by Kaufmann et al. (2012) for multi-armed bandits. Our method uses…