Related papers: Information-directed sampling for bandits: a prime…
In this paper, we propose an information-theoretic exploration strategy for stochastic, discrete multi-armed bandits that achieves optimal regret. Our strategy is based on the value of information criterion. This criterion measures the…
We study the evolution of information in interactive decision making through the lens of a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem. Focusing on a fundamental example where a unique optimal arm outperforms the rest by a fixed margin, we…
How to explore efficiently is a central problem in multi-armed bandits. In this paper, we introduce the metadata-based multi-task bandit problem, where the agent needs to solve a large number of related multi-armed bandit tasks and can…
We consider a Bayesian budgeted multi-armed bandit problem, in which each arm consumes a different amount of resources when selected and there is a budget constraint on the total amount of resources that can be used. Budgeted Thompson…
Contextual bandits are a form of multi-armed bandit in which the agent has access to predictive side information (known as the context) for each arm at each time step, and have been used to model personalized news recommendation, ad…
Contextual bandits constitute a classical framework for decision-making under uncertainty. In this setting, the goal is to learn the arms of highest reward subject to contextual information, while the unknown reward parameters of each arm…
We consider a special case of bandit problems, named batched bandits, in which an agent observes batches of responses over a certain time period. Unlike previous work, we consider a more practically relevant batch-centric scenario of batch…
In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, d arms are available to the decision maker who pulls them sequentially in order to maximize his cumulative reward. Guarantees can be obtained on a relative quantity called regret, which scales…
We consider the best-k-arm identification problem for multi-armed bandits, where the objective is to select the exact set of k arms with the highest mean rewards by sequentially allocating measurement effort. We characterize the necessary…
Multi-armed bandits (MAB) model sequential decision making problems, in which a learner sequentially chooses arms with unknown reward distributions in order to maximize its cumulative reward. Most of the prior work on MAB assumes that the…
We study the contextual multi-armed bandit problem with a finite context space (a.k.a. subpopulations), where the learner recommends a best action for each context and is evaluated by context-weighted simple regret. Our guarantees are…
We introduce a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, in which bandits are streamed one at a time to the player, and at each point, the player can either choose to pull the current bandit or move on to the next bandit. Once a…
In this paper we consider the two-armed bandit problem, which often naturally appears per se or as a subproblem in some multi-armed generalizations, and serves as a starting point for introducing additional problem features. The…
Learning good interventions in a causal graph can be modelled as a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with side-information. First, we study this problem when interventions are more expensive than observations and a budget is specified.…
We study the Bayesian regret of the renowned Thompson Sampling algorithm in contextual bandits with binary losses and adversarially-selected contexts. We adapt the information-theoretic perspective of \cite{RvR16} to the contextual setting…
We study the performance of the Thompson Sampling algorithm for logistic bandit problems. In this setting, an agent receives binary rewards with probabilities determined by a logistic function, $\exp(\beta \langle a, \theta…
Thompson Sampling is one of the oldest heuristics for multi-armed bandit problems. It is a randomized algorithm based on Bayesian ideas, and has recently generated significant interest after several studies demonstrated it to have better…
We investigate the challenging problem of adversarial multi-armed bandits operating under time-varying constraints, a scenario motivated by numerous real-world applications. To address this complex setting, we propose a novel primal-dual…
Contextual multi-armed bandit problems arise frequently in important industrial applications. Existing solutions model the context either linearly, which enables uncertainty driven (principled) exploration, or non-linearly, by using…
Reinforcement learning studies how to balance exploration and exploitation in real-world systems, optimizing interactions with the world while simultaneously learning how the world operates. One general class of algorithms for such learning…