Related papers: Prior Diffusiveness and Regret in the Linear-Gauss…

Dueling bandits are widely used to model preferential feedback prevalent in many applications such as recommendation systems and ranking. In this paper, we study the Borda regret minimization problem for dueling bandits, which aims to…

Thompson Sampling, one of the oldest heuristics for solving multi-armed bandits, has recently been shown to demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. The empirical success has led to great interests in theoretical understanding of this…

We consider best arm identification in the multi-armed bandit problem. Assuming certain continuity conditions of the prior, we characterize the rate of the Bayesian simple regret. Differing from Bayesian regret minimization (Lai, 1987), the…

We demonstrate that, in the classical non-stochastic regret minimization problem with $d$ decisions, gains and losses to be respectively maximized or minimized are fundamentally different. Indeed, by considering the additional sparsity…

Thompson Sampling has been widely used for contextual bandit problems due to the flexibility of its modeling power. However, a general theory for this class of methods in the frequentist setting is still lacking. In this paper, we present a…

A challenging aspect of the bandit problem is that a stochastic reward is observed only for the chosen arm and the rewards of other arms remain missing. The dependence of the arm choice on the past context and reward pairs compounds the…

The problem of multi-armed bandits (MAB) asks to make sequential decisions while balancing between exploitation and exploration, and have been successfully applied to a wide range of practical scenarios. Various algorithms have been…

We revisit combinatorial Thompson sampling (CTS) for semi-bandits with sleeping arms, where arm availability varies over time and actions must satisfy combinatorial constraints, as in wireless mesh routing with fluctuating link…

We develop a form Thompson sampling for online learning under full feedback - also known as prediction with expert advice - where the learner's prior is defined over the space of an adversary's future actions, rather than the space of…

We study the setting of optimizing with bandit feedback with additional prior knowledge provided to the learner in the form of an initial hint of the optimal action. We present a novel algorithm for stochastic linear bandits that uses this…

In this paper we consider stochastic multiarmed bandit problems. Recently a policy, DMED, is proposed and proved to achieve the asymptotic bound for the model that each reward distribution is supported in a known bounded interval, e.g.…

Motivated by the pressing need for efficient optimization in online recommender systems, we revisit the cascading bandit model proposed by Kveton et al. (2015). While Thompson sampling (TS) algorithms have been shown to be empirically…

We study the Gaussian process (GP) bandit problem, whose goal is to minimize regret under an unknown reward function lying in some reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). The maximum posterior variance analysis is vital in analyzing…

We investigate the online bandit learning of the monotone multi-linear DR-submodular functions, designing the algorithm $\mathtt{BanditMLSM}$ that attains $O(T^{2/3}\log T)$ of $(1-1/e)$-regret. Then we reduce submodular bandit with…

Ensemble sampling serves as a practical approximation to Thompson sampling when maintaining an exact posterior distribution over model parameters is computationally intractable. In this paper, we establish a regret bound that ensures…

Bayesian optimization (BO) with Gaussian process (GP) surrogate models is a powerful black-box optimization method. Acquisition functions are a critical part of a BO algorithm as they determine how the new samples are selected. Some of the…

In (online) learning theory the concepts of sparsity, variance and curvature are well-understood and are routinely used to obtain refined regret and generalization bounds. In this paper we further our understanding of these concepts in the…

We study online reinforcement learning in linear Markov decision processes with adversarial losses and bandit feedback, without prior knowledge on transitions or access to simulators. We introduce two algorithms that achieve improved regret…

This paper considers the distributed bandit convex optimization problem with time-varying constraints. In this problem, the global loss function is the average of all the local convex loss functions, which are unknown beforehand. Each agent…

We give a simple optimistic algorithm for which it is easy to derive regret bounds of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{t_{\rm mix} SAT})$ after $T$ steps in uniformly ergodic Markov decision processes with $S$ states, $A$ actions, and mixing time parameter…