Related papers: Balancing optimism and pessimism in offline-to-onl…
Sequential decision-making under uncertainty often involves multiple agents learning which actions (arms) yield the highest rewards through repeated interaction with a stochastic environment. This setting is commonly modeled by cooperative…
Most algorithms for the multi-armed bandit problem in reinforcement learning aimed to maximize the expected reward, which are thus useful in searching the optimized candidate with the highest reward (function value) for diverse applications…
In this book, I introduce the basic concepts of Online Learning through the modern view of Online Convex Optimization. Here, online learning refers to the framework of regret minimization under worst-case assumptions. I present first-order…
This paper is in the field of stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits (MABs), i.e. those sequential selection techniques able to learn online using only the feedback given by the chosen option (a.k.a. $arm$). We study a particular case of the rested…
Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving many real-world interactive machine learning problems. Despite multiple recent successes on statistically and computationally efficient methods, the practical behavior of these…
The paper proposes a novel upper confidence bound (UCB) procedure for identifying the arm with the largest mean in a multi-armed bandit game in the fixed confidence setting using a small number of total samples. The procedure cannot be…
In view of its power in extracting feature representation, contrastive self-supervised learning has been successfully integrated into the practice of (deep) reinforcement learning (RL), leading to efficient policy learning in various…
Offline model-based optimization (MBO) seeks to discover high-performing designs using only a fixed dataset of past evaluations. Most existing methods rely on learning a surrogate model via regression and implicitly assume that good…
We study the multichannel quickest change detection problem with bandit feedback and controlled sensing, in which an agent sequentially selects one of the data streams to observe at each time-step and aims to detect an unknown change as…
A stochastic combinatorial semi-bandit is an online learning problem where at each step a learning agent chooses a subset of ground items subject to constraints, and then observes stochastic weights of these items and receives their sum as…
In many platforms, user arrivals exhibit a self-reinforcing behavior: future user arrivals are likely to have preferences similar to users who were satisfied in the past. In other words, arrivals exhibit positive externalities. We study…
We address policy learning with logged data in contextual bandits. Current offline-policy learning algorithms are mostly based on inverse propensity score (IPS) weighting requiring the logging policy to have \emph{full support} i.e. a…
Batch policy optimization considers leveraging existing data for policy construction before interacting with an environment. Although interest in this problem has grown significantly in recent years, its theoretical foundations remain…
Offline RL algorithms must account for the fact that the dataset they are provided may leave many facets of the environment unknown. The most common way to approach this challenge is to employ pessimistic or conservative methods, which…
Several optimism-based stochastic bandit algorithms -- including UCB, UCB-V, linear UCB, and finite-arm GP-UCB -- achieve logarithmic regret using proofs that, despite superficial differences, follow essentially the same structure. This…
We study inference on the optimal welfare in a policy learning problem and propose reporting a lower confidence band (LCB). A natural approach to constructing an LCB is to invert a one-sided t-test based on an efficient estimator for the…
We study the problem of offline policy optimization in stochastic contextual bandit problems, where the goal is to learn a near-optimal policy based on a dataset of decision data collected by a suboptimal behavior policy. Rather than making…
The upper confidence bound (UCB) policy is recognized as an order-optimal solution for the classical total-reward bandit problem. While similar UCB-based approaches have been applied to the max bandit problem, which aims to maximize the…
We define an online learning and optimization problem with discrete and irreversible decisions contributing toward a coverage target. In each period, a decision-maker selects facilities to open, receives information on the success of each…
We study regret minimization in a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting and establish a fundamental trade-off between the regret suffered under an algorithm, and its statistical robustness. Considering broad classes of underlying arms'…