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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…
Two-sided matching markets have been widely studied in the literature due to their rich applications. Since participants are usually uncertain about their preferences, online algorithms have recently been adopted to learn them through…
The cross-learning contextual bandit problem with graphical feedback has recently attracted significant attention. In this setting, there is a contextual bandit with a feedback graph over the arms, and pulling an arm reveals the loss for…
In many modern applications, a system must dynamically choose between several adaptive learning algorithms that are trained online. Examples include model selection in streaming environments, switching between trading strategies in finance,…
The principle of optimism in the face of uncertainty is prevalent throughout sequential decision making problems such as multi-armed bandits and reinforcement learning (RL). To be successful, an optimistic RL algorithm must over-estimate…
We consider model selection in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. Given a set of base learning algorithms, an effective model selection strategy adapts to the best learning algorithm in an online fashion. We show that by…
We consider a combinatorial multi-armed bandit problem for maximum value reward function under maximum value and index feedback. This is a new feedback structure that lies in between commonly studied semi-bandit and full-bandit feedback…
We consider the problem where M agents collaboratively interact with an instance of a stochastic K-armed contextual bandit, where K>>M. The goal of the agents is to simultaneously minimize the cumulative regret over all the agents over a…
In this paper, we study the problem of fair sequential decision making with biased linear bandit feedback. At each round, a player selects an action described by a covariate and by a sensitive attribute. The perceived reward is a linear…
While significant progress has been made in designing algorithms that minimize regret in online decision-making, real-world scenarios often introduce additional complexities, perhaps the most challenging of which is missing outcomes.…
Cascading bandits is a natural and popular model that frames the task of learning to rank from Bernoulli click feedback in a bandit setting. For the case of unstructured rewards, we prove matching upper and lower bounds for the…
Much of the literature on optimal design of bandit algorithms is based on minimization of expected regret. It is well known that designs that are optimal over certain exponential families can achieve expected regret that grows…
We study a stochastic bandit algorithm motivated by retry-aware objectives that value the best outcome among multiple attempts, such as pass@$k$ and max@$k$. Given a posterior over arm values, ReMax chooses a sampling distribution that…
This paper introduces the informational multi-armed bandit (IMAB) model in which at each round, a player chooses an arm, observes a symbol, and receives an unobserved reward in the form of the symbol's self-information. Thus, the expected…
Multi-dueling bandits, where a learner selects $m \geq 2$ arms per round and observes only the winner, arise naturally in many applications including ranking and recommendation systems, yet a fundamental question has remained open: can a…
We study a stochastic budget-allocation problem over $K$ tasks. At each round $t$, the learner chooses an allocation $X_t \in \Delta_K$. Task $k$ succeeds with probability $F_k(X_{t,k})$, where $F_1,\dots,F_K$ are nondecreasing…
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…
This paper studies the optimistic variant of Fictitious Play for learning in two-player zero-sum games. While it is known that Optimistic FTRL -- a regularized algorithm with a bounded stepsize parameter -- obtains constant regret in this…
Policy optimization methods are one of the most widely used classes of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. Yet, so far, such methods have been mostly analyzed from an optimization perspective, without addressing the problem of…
We study stochastic linear optimization problem with bandit feedback. The set of arms take values in an $N$-dimensional space and belong to a bounded polyhedron described by finitely many linear inequalities. We provide a lower bound for…