Related papers: Risk-sensitive Bandits: Arm Mixture Optimality and…
We consider a bandit problem where the buget is smaller than the number of arms, which may be infinite. In this regime, the usual objective in the literature is to minimize simple regret. To analyze broad classes of distributions with…
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 improving multi-armed bandits problem is a formal model for allocating effort under uncertainty, motivated by scenarios such as investing research effort into new technologies, performing clinical trials, and hyperparameter selection…
We consider the problem of minimizing the regret in stochastic multi-armed bandit, when the measure of goodness of an arm is not the mean return, but some general function of the mean and the variance.We characterize the conditions under…
We present simple and efficient algorithms for the batched stochastic multi-armed bandit and batched stochastic linear bandit problems. We prove bounds for their expected regrets that improve over the best-known regret bounds for any number…
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…
We introduce a novel extension of the canonical multi-armed bandit problem that incorporates an additional strategic innovation: abstention. In this enhanced framework, the agent is not only tasked with selecting an arm at each time step,…
When multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms allocate pulls among competing arms, the resulting allocation can exhibit huge variation. This is particularly harmful in modern applications such as learning-enhanced platform operations and…
We study a security threat to adversarial multi-armed bandits, in which an attacker perturbs the loss or reward signal to control the behavior of the victim bandit player. We show that the attacker is able to mislead any no-regret…
We study adaptive regret bounds in terms of the variation of the losses (the so-called path-length bounds) for both multi-armed bandit and more generally linear bandit. We first show that the seemingly suboptimal path-length bound of (Wei…
Modern systems, such as digital platforms and service systems, increasingly rely on contextual bandits for online decision-making; however, their deployment can inadvertently create unfair exposure among arms, undermining long-term platform…
Mode estimation is a classical problem in statistics with a wide range of applications in machine learning. Despite this, there is little understanding in its robustness properties under possibly adversarial data contamination. In this…
Motivated by modern applications, such as online advertisement and recommender systems, we study the top-$k$ extreme contextual bandits problem, where the total number of arms can be enormous, and the learner is allowed to select $k$ arms…
This paper introduces a general multi-agent bandit model in which each agent is facing a finite set of arms and may communicate with other agents through a central controller in order to identify, in pure exploration, or play, in regret…
Designing efficient general-purpose contextual bandit algorithms that work with large -- or even continuous -- action spaces would facilitate application to important scenarios such as information retrieval, recommendation systems, and…
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'…
We consider the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem, where an agent sequentially chooses actions and observes rewards for the actions it took. While the majority of algorithms try to minimize the regret, i.e., the cumulative difference between…
We study the distribution of regret in stochastic multi-armed bandits and episodic reinforcement learning through a unified framework. We formalize a distributional regret bound as a probabilistic guarantee that holds uniformly over all…
We study a new type of K-armed bandit problem where the expected return of one arm may depend on the returns of other arms. We present a new algorithm for this general class of problems and show that under certain circumstances it is…
We study high-probability regret bounds for adversarial $K$-armed bandits with time-varying feedback graphs over $T$ rounds. For general strongly observable graphs, we develop an algorithm that achieves the optimal regret…