Related papers: Bandit Social Learning with Exploration Episodes

This paper studies multi-stage systems with end-to-end bandit feedback. In such systems, each job needs to go through multiple stages, each managed by a different agent, before generating an outcome. Each agent can only control its own…

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…

Incentivized exploration in multi-armed bandits (MAB) has witnessed increasing interests and many progresses in recent years, where a principal offers bonuses to agents to do explorations on her behalf. However, almost all existing studies…

We study the problem of infrequent exploration in linear bandits, addressing a significant yet overlooked gap between fully adaptive exploratory methods (e.g., UCB and Thompson Sampling), which explore potentially at every time step, and…

Most modern systems strive to learn from interactions with users, and many engage in exploration: making potentially suboptimal choices for the sake of acquiring new information. We initiate a study of the interplay between exploration and…

We study the problem of minimising regret in two-armed bandit problems with Gaussian rewards. Our objective is to use this simple setting to illustrate that strategies based on an exploration phase (up to a stopping time) followed by…

We consider the classical multi-armed bandit problem, but with strategic arms. In this context, each arm is characterized by a bounded support reward distribution and strategically aims to maximize its own utility by potentially retaining a…

We consider the problem of multiple users targeting the arms of a single multi-armed stochastic bandit. The motivation for this problem comes from cognitive radio networks, where selfish users need to coexist without any side communication…

We investigate contextual bandits in the presence of side-observations across arms in order to design recommendation algorithms for users connected via social networks. Users in social networks respond to their friends' activity, and hence…

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…

Contextual bandits are widely used in industrial personalization systems. These online learning frameworks learn a treatment assignment policy in the presence of treatment effects that vary with the observed contextual features of the…

We study "incentivized exploration" (IE) in social learning problems where the principal (a recommendation algorithm) can leverage information asymmetry to incentivize sequentially-arriving agents to take exploratory actions. We identify…

Motivated by the phenomenon of strategic agents gaming a recommender system to maximize the number of times they are recommended to users, we study a strategic variant of the linear contextual bandit problem, where the arms can…

Motivated by clinical trials, we study bandits with observable non-compliance. At each step, the learner chooses an arm, after, instead of observing only the reward, it also observes the action that took place. We show that such…

Increasingly, recommender systems are tasked with improving users' long-term satisfaction. In this context, we study a content exploration task, which we formalize as a bandit problem with delayed rewards. There is an apparent trade-off in…

We study the problem of using causal models to improve the rate at which good interventions can be learned online in a stochastic environment. Our formalism combines multi-arm bandits and causal inference to model a novel type of bandit…

We study bandit learning in matching markets, where players and arms constitute the two market sides, and the players' utilities are linear in the arm contexts. In each round, new arms arrive with observable contexts. Then, the algorithm…

Exploration is often necessary in online learning to maximize long-term reward, but it comes at the cost of short-term 'regret'. We study how this cost of exploration is shared across multiple groups. For example, in a clinical trial…

Twitter, a popular social network, presents great opportunities for on-line machine learning research. However, previous research has focused almost entirely on learning from passively collected data. We study the problem of learning to…

A contextual bandit problem is studied in a highly non-stationary environment, which is ubiquitous in various recommender systems due to the time-varying interests of users. Two models with disjoint and hybrid payoffs are considered to…