Related papers: Infrequent Exploration in Linear Bandits
Real-world contextual bandit problems with complex reward models are often tackled with iteratively trained models, such as boosting trees. However, it is difficult to directly apply simple and effective exploration strategies--such as…
Bandit learning is characterized by the tension between long-term exploration and short-term exploitation. However, as has recently been noted, in settings in which the choices of the learning algorithm correspond to important decisions…
Contextual bandits serve as a fundamental model for many sequential decision making tasks. The most popular theoretically justified approaches are based on the optimism principle. While these algorithms can be practical, they are known to…
Motivated by the challenges of edge inference, we study a variant of the cascade bandit model in which each arm corresponds to an inference model with an associated accuracy and error probability. We analyse four decision-making…
Online learning algorithms, widely used to power search and content optimization on the web, must balance exploration and exploitation, potentially sacrificing the experience of current users in order to gain information that will lead to…
This work addresses the problem of regret minimization in non-stochastic multi-armed bandit problems, focusing on performance guarantees that hold with high probability. Such results are rather scarce in the literature since proving them…
Pure exploration in bandits formalises multiple real-world problems, such as tuning hyper-parameters or conducting user studies to test a set of items, where different safety, resource, and fairness constraints on the decision space…
We study the problem of worst case regret in piecewise stationary multi armed bandits. While the minimax theory for stationary bandits is well established, understanding analogous limits in time-varying settings is challenging. Existing…
Bayesian bandit algorithms with approximate Bayesian inference have been widely used in real-world applications. Despite the superior practical performance, their theoretical justification is less investigated in the literature, especially…
The multi-armed bandit(MAB) is a classical sequential decision problem. Most work requires assumptions about the reward distribution (e.g., bounded), while practitioners may have difficulty obtaining information about these distributions to…
Thompson Sampling is a principled method for balancing exploration and exploitation, but its real-world adoption faces computational challenges in large-scale or non-conjugate settings. While ensemble-based approaches offer partial…
In the incentivized exploration model, a principal aims to explore and learn over time by interacting with a sequence of self-interested agents. It has been recently understood that the main challenge in designing incentive-compatible…
While Large Language Models (LLMs) hold promise to become autonomous agents, they often explore suboptimally in sequential decision-making. Recent work has sought to enhance this capability via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement…
A more general formulation of the linear bandit problem is considered to allow for dependencies over time. Specifically, it is assumed that there exists an unknown $\mathbb{R}^d$-valued stationary $\varphi$-mixing sequence of parameters…
This paper introduces the framework of multi-armed sampling, which serves as the sampling counterpart to the optimization problem of multi-armed bandits. Our primary motivation is to rigorously examine the exploration-exploitation trade-off…
We study a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where an agent is granted a free exploration budget before regret accumulates, a setting not captured by the classic regret minimization or pure exploration paradigms. The goal is to design…
Recent work on exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) has led to a series of increasingly complex solutions to the problem. This increase in complexity often comes at the expense of generality. Recent empirical studies suggest that,…
We propose feature perturbation, a simple yet effective exploration strategy for contextual bandits that injects randomness directly into feature inputs, instead of randomizing unknown parameters or adding noise to rewards. Remarkably, this…
Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…
Despite the great interest in the bandit problem, designing efficient algorithms for complex models remains challenging, as there is typically no analytical way to quantify uncertainty. In this paper, we propose Multiplier Bootstrap-based…