Related papers: Optimal Control of Fluid Restless Multi-armed Band…
Traditional multi-armed bandit (MAB) formulations usually make certain assumptions about the underlying arms' distributions, such as bounds on the support or their tail behaviour. Moreover, such parametric information is usually 'baked'…
We propose Streaming Bandits, a Restless Multi Armed Bandit (RMAB) framework in which heterogeneous arms may arrive and leave the system after staying on for a finite lifetime. Streaming Bandits naturally capture the health intervention…
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…
We present an online tutoring system that learns to provide effective feedback to students after they answer questions incorrectly. Using data from one million students, the system learns which assistance action (e.g., one of multiple…
We study the problem of planning restless multi-armed bandits (RMABs) with multiple actions. This is a popular model for multi-agent systems with applications like multi-channel communication, monitoring and machine maintenance tasks, and…
We study the problem of federated stochastic multi-arm contextual bandits with unknown contexts, in which M agents are faced with different bandits and collaborate to learn. The communication model consists of a central server and the…
We introduce a new class of reinforcement learning methods referred to as {\em episodic multi-armed bandits} (eMAB). In eMAB the learner proceeds in {\em episodes}, each composed of several {\em steps}, in which it chooses an action and…
This paper addresses the poor finite-horizon performance of existing online \emph{restless bandit} (RB) algorithms, which stems from the prohibitive sample complexity of learning a full \emph{Markov decision process} (MDP) for each agent.…
Time-constrained decision processes have been ubiquitous in many fundamental applications in physics, biology and computer science. Recently, restart strategies have gained significant attention for boosting the efficiency of…
We study a system with finitely many groups of multi-action bandit processes, each of which is a Markov decision process (MDP) with finite state and action spaces and potentially different transition matrices when taking different actions.…
The restless bandit problem is one of the most well-studied generalizations of the celebrated stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory. In its ultimate generality, the restless bandit problem is known to be PSPACE-Hard to…
Kinodynamic motion planners allow robots to perform complex manipulation tasks under dynamics constraints or with black-box models. However, they struggle to find high-quality solutions, especially when a steering function is unavailable.…
Restless multi-armed bandits (RMAB) is a framework for allocating limited resources under uncertainty. It is an extremely useful model for monitoring beneficiaries and executing timely interventions to ensure maximum benefit in public…
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…
The ability to learn and execute optimal control policies safely is critical to realization of complex autonomy, especially where task restarts are not available and/or the systems are safety-critical. Safety requirements are often…
Non-stationary multi-armed bandits enable agents to adapt to changing environments by incorporating mechanisms to detect and respond to shifts in reward distributions, making them well-suited for dynamic settings. However, existing…
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…
Contextual bandits are widely-used in the study of learning-based control policies for finite action spaces. While the problem is well-studied for bandits with perfectly observed context vectors, little is known about the case of…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) model is one of the most classical models to study decision-making in an uncertain environment. In this model, a player chooses one of $K$ possible arms of a bandit machine to play at each time step, where the…
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…