Related papers: Autocorrelation effects in a stochastic-process mo…

We introduce and study a new class of stochastic bandit problems, referred to as predictive bandits. In each round, the decision maker first decides whether to gather information about the rewards of particular arms (so that their rewards…

We introduce a class of learning problems where the agent is presented with a series of tasks. Intuitively, if there is relation among those tasks, then the information gained during execution of one task has value for the execution of…

Sequential portfolio selection has attracted increasing interests in the machine learning and quantitative finance communities in recent years. As a mathematical framework for reinforcement learning policies, the stochastic multi-armed…

In the multiarmed bandit problem a gambler chooses an arm of a slot machine to pull considering a tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. We study the stochastic bandit problem where each arm has a reward distribution supported in a…

Tree-form sequential decision making (TFSDM) extends classical one-shot decision making by modeling tree-form interactions between an agent and a potentially adversarial environment. It captures the online decision-making problems that each…

We study the $K$-armed contextual dueling bandit problem, a sequential decision making setting in which the learner uses contextual information to make two decisions, but only observes \emph{preference-based feedback} suggesting that one…

Multi-armed bandit methods have been used for dynamic experiments particularly in online services. Among the methods, thompson sampling is widely used because it is simple but shows desirable performance. Many thompson sampling methods for…

Recent work has considered natural variations of the multi-armed bandit problem, where the reward distribution of each arm is a special function of the time passed since its last pulling. In this direction, a simple (yet widely applicable)…

We study the effect of impairment on stochastic multi-armed bandits and develop new ways to mitigate it. Impairment effect is the phenomena where an agent only accrues reward for an action if they have played it at least a few times in the…

This paper considers social learning amongst rational agents (for example, sensors in a network). We consider three models of social learning in increasing order of sophistication. In the first model, based on its private observation of a…

We consider the linear contextual bandit problem with resource consumption, in addition to reward generation. In each round, the outcome of pulling an arm is a reward as well as a vector of resource consumptions. The expected values of…

We consider the regret minimization task in a dueling bandits problem with context information. In every round of the sequential decision problem, the learner makes a context-dependent selection of two choice alternatives (arms) to be…

In this work, we study clustered contextual bandits where rewards and resource consumption are the outcomes of cluster-specific linear models. The arms are divided in clusters, with the cluster memberships being unknown to an algorithm.…

Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the strategy deployed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. Further, often we have only partial information on the state of the system. We study the…

We present a formal model of human decision-making in explore-exploit tasks using the context of multi-armed bandit problems, where the decision-maker must choose among multiple options with uncertain rewards. We address the standard…

Assistive multi-armed bandit problems can be used to model team situations between a human and an autonomous system like a domestic service robot. To account for human biases such as the risk-aversion described in the Cumulative Prospect…

In this work, we investigate the problem of adapting to the presence or absence of causal structure in multi-armed bandit problems. In addition to the usual reward signal, we assume the learner has access to additional variables, observed…

In this paper we consider the problem of learning the optimal policy for uncontrolled restless bandit problems. In an uncontrolled restless bandit problem, there is a finite set of arms, each of which when pulled yields a positive reward.…

We consider the problem of learning to choose actions using contextual information when provided with limited feedback in the form of relative pairwise comparisons. We study this problem in the dueling-bandits framework of Yue et al.…

Multi-dueling bandits, where a learner selects $m \geq 2$ arms per round and observes only the winner, arise naturally in many applications including ranking and recommendation systems, yet a fundamental question has remained open: can a…