Related papers: Stability and Robustness via Regularization: Bandi…
Classic no-regret multi-armed bandit algorithms, including the Upper Confidence Bound (UCB), Hedge, and EXP3, are inherently unfair by design. Their unfairness stems from their objective of playing the most rewarding arm as frequently as…
We propose an approach to construction of robust non-Euclidean iterative algorithms for convex composite stochastic optimization based on truncation of stochastic gradients. For such algorithms, we establish sub-Gaussian confidence bounds…
Different types of dynamics have been studied in repeated game play, and one of them which has received much attention recently consists of those based on "no-regret" algorithms from the area of machine learning. It is known that dynamics…
Most bandit algorithm designs are purely theoretical. Therefore, they have strong regret guarantees, but also are often too conservative in practice. In this work, we pioneer the idea of algorithm design by minimizing the empirical Bayes…
This paper introduces and addresses a wide class of stochastic bandit problems where the function mapping the arm to the corresponding reward exhibits some known structural properties. Most existing structures (e.g. linear, Lipschitz,…
We show that the average stability notion introduced by \cite{kearns1999algorithmic, bousquet2002stability} is invariant to data preconditioning, for a wide class of generalized linear models that includes most of the known exp-concave…
Designing efficient general-purpose contextual bandit algorithms that work with large -- or even continuous -- action spaces would facilitate application to important scenarios such as information retrieval, recommendation systems, and…
We study replicable algorithms for stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB) and linear bandits with UCB (Upper Confidence Bound) based exploration. A bandit algorithm is $\rho$-replicable if two executions using shared internal randomness but…
Consider linear ill-posed problems governed by the system $A_i x = y_i$ for $i =1, \cdots, p$, where each $A_i$ is a bounded linear operator from a Banach space $X$ to a Hilbert space $Y_i$. In case $p$ is huge, solving the problem by an…
Non-stationary parametric bandits have attracted much attention recently. There are three principled ways to deal with non-stationarity, including sliding-window, weighted, and restart strategies. As many non-stationary environments exhibit…
We consider distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems, reformulated as distributionally robust feasibility (DRF) problems, with multiple expectation constraints. We propose a generic stochastic first-order meta-algorithm, where…
Bayesian bandit algorithms with approximate Bayesian inference have been widely used in real-world applications. However, there is a large discrepancy between the superior practical performance of these approaches and their theoretical…
We study the contextual continuum bandits problem, where the learner sequentially receives a side information vector and has to choose an action in a convex set, minimizing a function associated with the context. The goal is to minimize all…
Recent work by Woodworth et al. (2020) shows that the optimization dynamics of gradient descent for overparameterized problems can be viewed as low-dimensional dual dynamics induced by a mirror map, explaining the implicit regularization…
Logistic Bandits have recently attracted substantial attention, by providing an uncluttered yet challenging framework for understanding the impact of non-linearity in parametrized bandits. It was shown by Faury et al. (2020) that the…
In the stochastic bandit problem, the goal is to maximize an unknown function via a sequence of noisy evaluations. Typically, the observation noise is assumed to be independent of the evaluation point and to satisfy a tail bound uniformly…
We develop a general theory to optimize the frequentist regret for sequential learning problems, where efficient bandit and reinforcement learning algorithms can be derived from unified Bayesian principles. We propose a novel optimization…
We study a $K$-armed non-stationary bandit model where rewards change smoothly, as captured by H\"{o}lder class assumptions on rewards as functions of time. Such smooth changes are parametrized by a H\"{o}lder exponent $\beta$ and…
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 following question in the context of imitation learning for continuous control: how are the underlying stability properties of an expert policy reflected in the sample-complexity of an imitation learning task? We provide the…