Related papers: A characterization of sample adaptivity in UCB dat…
We establish strong laws of large numbers and central limit theorems for the regret of two of the most popular bandit algorithms: Thompson sampling and UCB. Here, our characterizations of the regret distribution complement the…
We consider a novel multi-armed bandit framework where the rewards obtained by pulling the arms are functions of a common latent random variable. The correlation between arms due to the common random source can be used to design a…
This paper studies a new variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandits problem where auxiliary information about the arm rewards is available in the form of control variates. In many applications like queuing and wireless networks, the arm…
One of the key drivers of complexity in the classical (stochastic) multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is the difference between mean rewards in the top two arms, also known as the instance gap. The celebrated Upper Confidence Bound (UCB)…
In this study, we consider the infinitely many-armed bandit problems in a rested rotting setting, where the mean reward of an arm may decrease with each pull, while otherwise, it remains unchanged. We explore two scenarios regarding the…
We consider a multi-armed bandit framework where the rewards obtained by pulling different arms are correlated. We develop a unified approach to leverage these reward correlations and present fundamental generalizations of classic bandit…
Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithms are a widely-used class of sequential algorithms for the $K$-armed bandit problem. Despite extensive research over the past decades aimed at understanding their asymptotic and (near) minimax…
Motivated by wireless networks where interference or channel state estimates provide partial insight into throughput, we study a variant of the classical stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in which the learner has limited access to…
We consider a finite-armed structured bandit problem in which mean rewards of different arms are known functions of a common hidden parameter $\theta^*$. Since we do not place any restrictions of these functions, the problem setting…
Stochastic bandit algorithms are usually analyzed under a mean-reward criterion, yet many problems favor arms with strong upper-tail performance, which we study herein. For a fixed miscoverage level \(\alpha\), the natural upper-tail target…
UCT, a state-of-the art algorithm for Monte Carlo tree sampling (MCTS), is based on UCB, a sampling policy for the Multi-armed Bandit Problem (MAB) that minimizes the accumulated regret. However, MCTS differs from MAB in that only the final…
A Top Two sampling rule for bandit identification is a method which selects the next arm to sample from among two candidate arms, a leader and a challenger. Due to their simplicity and good empirical performance, they have received…
It is well known that in stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB), the sample mean of an arm is typically not an unbiased estimator of its true mean. In this paper, we decouple three different sources of this selection bias: adaptive…
This paper studies regret minimization in a multi-armed bandit. It is well known that side information, such as the prior distribution of arm means in Thompson sampling, can improve the statistical efficiency of the bandit algorithm. While…
We define a general framework for a large class of combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) problems, where subsets of base arms with unknown distributions form super arms. In each round, a super arm is played and the base arms contained in…
During online decision making in Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB), one needs to conduct inference on the true mean reward of each arm based on data collected so far at each step. However, since the arms are adaptively selected--thereby yielding…
The bias of the sample means of the arms in multi-armed bandits is an important issue in adaptive data analysis that has recently received considerable attention in the literature. Existing results relate in precise ways the sign and…
In this paper, we study the behavior of the Upper Confidence Bound-Variance (UCB-V) algorithm for the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problems, a variant of the canonical Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithm that incorporates variance estimates…
Sampling from the equilibrium distribution has always been a major problem in molecular simulations due to the very high dimensionality of conformational space. Over several decades, many approaches have been used to overcome the problem.…
Strategic behavior against sequential learning methods, such as "click framing" in real recommendation systems, have been widely observed. Motivated by such behavior we study the problem of combinatorial multi-armed bandits (CMAB) under…