Related papers: Valid Post-Contextual Bandit Inference
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)…
Adaptive and sequential experiment design is a well-studied area in numerous domains. We survey and synthesize the work of the online statistical learning paradigm referred to as multi-armed bandits integrating the existing research as a…
Consider a requester who wishes to crowdsource a series of identical binary labeling tasks to a pool of workers so as to achieve an assured accuracy for each task, in a cost optimal way. The workers are heterogeneous with unknown but fixed…
We study contextual combinatorial bandits with probabilistically triggered arms (C$^2$MAB-T) under a variety of smoothness conditions that capture a wide range of applications, such as contextual cascading bandits and contextual influence…
The classical multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem involves a learner and a collection of K independent arms, each with its own ex ante unknown independent reward distribution. At each one of a finite number of rounds, the learner selects one…
We consider the multiarm bandit problems in the timevarying dynamic system for rich structural features. For the nonlinear dynamic model, we propose the approximate inference for the posterior distributions based on Laplace Approximation.…
This paper investigates the problem of best arm identification in $\textit{contaminated}$ stochastic multi-arm bandits. In this setting, the rewards obtained from any arm are replaced by samples from an adversarial model with probability…
The evolution of technology and education is driving the emergence of Intelligent & Autonomous Tutoring Systems (IATS), where objective and domain-agnostic methods for determining question difficulty are essential. Traditional human…
We propose an efficient Context-Aware clustering of Bandits (CAB) algorithm, which can capture collaborative effects. CAB can be easily deployed in a real-world recommendation system, where multi-armed bandits have been shown to perform…
In this paper, we discuss the asymptotic behavior of the Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithm in the context of multiarmed bandit problems and discuss its implication in downstream inferential tasks. While inferential tasks become…
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…
We use the lens of weak signal asymptotics to study a class of sequentially randomized experiments, including those that arise in solving multi-armed bandit problems. In an experiment with $n$ time steps, we let the mean reward gaps between…
In the classic Bayesian restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problem, there are $N$ arms, with rewards on all arms evolving at each time as Markov chains with known parameters. A player seeks to activate $K \geq 1$ arms at each time in order…
This paper introduces and addresses a wide class of stochastic bandit problems where the function mapping the arm to the corresponding reward exhibits some known structural properties. Most existing structures (e.g. linear, Lipschitz,…
Many sequential decision-making problems in communication networks can be modeled as contextual bandit problems, which are natural extensions of the well-known multi-armed bandit problem. In contextual bandit problems, at each time, an…
We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem motivated by ``large'' action spaces, and endowed with a population of arms containing exactly $K$ arm-types, each characterized by a distinct mean reward. The decision maker is…
Multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a class of online learning problems where a learning agent aims to maximize its expected cumulative reward while repeatedly selecting to pull arms with unknown reward distributions. We consider a scenario where…
We consider a general multi-armed bandit problem with correlated (and simple contextual and restless) elements, as a relaxed control problem. By introducing an entropy regularisation, we obtain a smooth asymptotic approximation to the value…
This paper presents a class of Dynamic Multi-Armed Bandit problems where the reward can be modeled as the noisy output of a time varying linear stochastic dynamic system that satisfies some boundedness constraints. The class allows many…
Multi-armed bandit algorithms have become a reference solution for handling the explore/exploit dilemma in recommender systems, and many other important real-world problems, such as display advertisement. However, such algorithms usually…