Related papers: Best Agent Identification for General Game Playing
We study an original problem of pure exploration in a strategic bandit model motivated by Monte Carlo Tree Search. It consists in identifying the best action in a game, when the player may sample random outcomes of sequentially chosen pairs…
Companies like Google and Microsoft run billions of auctions every day to sell advertising opportunities. Any change to the rules of these auctions can have a tremendous effect on the revenue of the company and the welfare of the…
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…
Contextual multi-armed bandit has shown to be an effective tool in recommender systems. In this paper, we study a novel problem of multi-facet bandits involving a group of bandits, each characterizing the users' needs from one unique…
We propose two linear bandits algorithms with per-step complexity sublinear in the number of arms $K$. The algorithms are designed for applications where the arm set is extremely large and slowly changing. Our key realization is that…
We formulate a multi-armed bandit (MAB) approach to choosing expert policies online in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Given a set of expert policies trained on a state and action space, the goal is to maximize the cumulative reward of…
We consider the thresholding bandit problem, whose goal is to find arms of mean rewards above a given threshold $\theta$, with a fixed budget of $T$ trials. We introduce LSA, a new, simple and anytime algorithm that aims to minimize the…
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…
Traditional multi-armed bandit (MAB) formulations usually make certain assumptions about the underlying arms' distributions, such as bounds on the support or their tail behaviour. Moreover, such parametric information is usually 'baked'…
Although many algorithms for the multi-armed bandit problem are well-understood theoretically, empirical confirmation of their effectiveness is generally scarce. This paper presents a thorough empirical study of the most popular multi-armed…
We consider a novel stochastic multi-armed bandit setting, where playing an arm makes it unavailable for a fixed number of time slots thereafter. This models situations where reusing an arm too often is undesirable (e.g. making the same…
We introduce the Best Group Identification problem in a multi-objective multi-armed bandit setting, where an agent interacts with groups of arms with vector-valued rewards. The performance of a group is determined by an efficiency vector…
We consider the problem of near-optimal arm identification in the fixed confidence setting of the infinitely armed bandit problem when nothing is known about the arm reservoir distribution. We (1) introduce a PAC-like framework within which…
In the infinite-armed bandit problem, each arm's average reward is sampled from an unknown distribution, and each arm can be sampled further to obtain noisy estimates of the average reward of that arm. Prior work focuses on identifying the…
We study the recovering bandits problem, a variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where the expected reward of each arm varies according to some unknown function of the time since the arm was last played. While being a natural…
The Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit problem is a sequential decision-making problem in which an agent selects a set of arms on each round, observes feedback for each of these arms and aims to maximize a known reward function of the arms it…
In this paper, we study the problem of Gaussian process (GP) bandits under relaxed optimization criteria stating that any function value above a certain threshold is "good enough". On the theoretical side, we study various {\em lenient…
This paper introduces a general framework for risk-sensitive bandits that integrates the notions of risk-sensitive objectives by adopting a rich class of distortion riskmetrics. The introduced framework subsumes the various existing…
We consider the nonstochastic multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem with agents collaborating via a communication network with delays. We show a lower bound for individual regret of all agents. We show that with suitable regularizers and…
Multi-player Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) have been extensively studied in the literature, motivated by applications to Cognitive Radio systems. Driven by such applications as well, we motivate the introduction of several levels of feedback…