Related papers: Approximating Opaque Top-k Queries
Submodular optimization with bandit feedback has recently been studied in a variety of contexts. In a number of real-world applications such as diversified recommender systems and data summarization, the submodular function exhibits…
In many scientific and engineering applications, we are tasked with the maximisation of an expensive to evaluate black box function $f$. Traditional settings for this problem assume just the availability of this single function. However, in…
We consider the evaluation of approximate top-k queries from relations with a-priori unknown values. Such relations can arise for example in the context of expensive predicates, or cloud-based data sources. The task is to find an…
Bandit based methods for tree search have recently gained popularity when applied to huge trees, e.g. in the game of go [6]. Their efficient exploration of the tree enables to re- turn rapidly a good value, and improve preci- sion if more…
The top-k operation, i.e., finding the k largest or smallest elements from a collection of scores, is an important model component, which is widely used in information retrieval, machine learning, and data mining. However, if the top-k…
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…
We give nearly-tight upper and lower bounds for the improving multi-armed bandits problem. An instance of this problem has $k$ arms, each of whose reward function is a concave and increasing function of the number of times that arm has been…
We study the problem of black-box optimization of a noisy function in the presence of low-cost approximations or fidelities, which is motivated by problems like hyper-parameter tuning. In hyper-parameter tuning evaluating the black-box…
Top-k threshold estimation is the problem of estimating the score of the k-th highest ranking result of a search query. A good estimate can be used to speed up many common top-k query processing algorithms, and thus a number of researchers…
We consider the problem of bandit optimization, inspired by stochastic optimization and online learning problems with bandit feedback. In this problem, the objective is to minimize a global loss function of all the actions, not necessarily…
This paper studies the problem of adaptively sampling from K distributions (arms) in order to identify the largest gap between any two adjacent means. We call this the MaxGap-bandit problem. This problem arises naturally in approximate…
Bandit based methods for tree search have recently gained popularity when applied to huge trees, e.g. in the game of go (Gelly et al., 2006). The UCT algorithm (Kocsis and Szepesvari, 2006), a tree search method based on Upper Confidence…
Closed-loop decision-making systems (e.g., lending, screening, or recidivism risk assessment) often operate under fairness and service constraints while inducing feedback effects: decisions change who appears in the future, yielding…
The fuzzy or soft $k$-means objective is a popular generalization of the well-known $k$-means problem, extending the clustering capability of the $k$-means to datasets that are uncertain, vague, and otherwise hard to cluster. In this paper,…
In this work, we address the open problem of finding low-complexity near-optimal multi-armed bandit algorithms for sequential decision making problems. Existing bandit algorithms are either sub-optimal and computationally simple (e.g.,…
This paper considers the problem of maximizing an expectation function over a finite set, or finite-arm bandit problem. We first propose a naive stochastic bandit algorithm for obtaining a probably approximately correct (PAC) solution to…
In this paper, we formulate a top-k query that compares objects in a database to a user-provided query object on a novel scoring function. The proposed scoring function combines the idea of attractive and repulsive dimensions into a general…
Motivated by many applications, we study clustering with a faulty oracle. In this problem, there are $n$ items belonging to $k$ unknown clusters, and the algorithm is allowed to ask the oracle whether two items belong to the same cluster or…
In the fixed budget thresholding bandit problem, an algorithm sequentially allocates a budgeted number of samples to different distributions. It then predicts whether the mean of each distribution is larger or lower than a given threshold.…
Black box optimisation of an unknown function from expensive and noisy evaluations is a ubiquitous problem in machine learning, academic research and industrial production. An abstraction of the problem can be formulated as a kernel based…