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Heavy-tailed distributions naturally arise in several settings, from finance to telecommunications. While regret minimization under subgaussian or bounded rewards has been widely studied, learning with heavy-tailed distributions only gained…
We study a multi-armed bandit problem in a dynamic environment where arm rewards evolve in a correlated fashion according to a Markov chain. Different than much of the work on related problems, in our formulation a learning algorithm does…
We describe a novel algorithm for noisy global optimisation and continuum-armed bandits, with good convergence properties over any continuous reward function having finitely many polynomial maxima. Over such functions, our algorithm…
Stochastic multi-armed bandits (MABs) provide a fundamental reinforcement learning model to study sequential decision making in uncertain environments. The upper confidence bounds (UCB) algorithm gave birth to the renaissance of bandit…
Contextual bandit learning is a reinforcement learning problem where the learner repeatedly receives a set of features (context), takes an action and receives a reward based on the action and context. We consider this problem under a…
We consider a variant of the multi-armed bandit model, which we call multi-armed bandit problem with known trend, where the gambler knows the shape of the reward function of each arm but not its distribution. This new problem is motivated…
We study the stochastic contextual bandit problem, where the reward is generated from an unknown function with additive noise. No assumption is made about the reward function other than boundedness. We propose a new algorithm, NeuralUCB,…
We consider a novel stochastic multi-armed bandit setting, where playing an arm makes it unavailable for a fixed number of time slots thereafter. This models situations where reusing an arm too often is undesirable (e.g. making the same…
This paper considers the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem and provides a new best-of-both-worlds (BOBW) algorithm that works nearly optimally in both stochastic and adversarial settings. In stochastic settings, some existing BOBW algorithms…
We consider the contextual combinatorial bandit setting where in each round, the learning agent, e.g., a recommender system, selects a subset of "arms," e.g., products, and observes rewards for both the individual base arms, which are a…
In many platforms, user arrivals exhibit a self-reinforcing behavior: future user arrivals are likely to have preferences similar to users who were satisfied in the past. In other words, arrivals exhibit positive externalities. We study…
We study the piecewise stationary combinatorial semi-bandit problem with causally related rewards. In our nonstationary environment, variations in the base arms' distributions, causal relationships between rewards, or both, change the…
We propose $\tt RandUCB$, a bandit strategy that builds on theoretically derived confidence intervals similar to upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms, but akin to Thompson sampling (TS), it uses randomization to trade off exploration and…
Continuously learning and leveraging the knowledge accumulated from prior tasks in order to improve future performance is a long standing machine learning problem. In this paper, we study the problem in the multi-armed bandit framework with…
We develop a novel and generic algorithm for the adversarial multi-armed bandit problem (or more generally the combinatorial semi-bandit problem). When instantiated differently, our algorithm achieves various new data-dependent regret…
The restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) framework is a popular approach to solving resource allocation problems in networked systems. In this paper, we study optimal resource allocation in RMABs facing unknown and non-stationary dynamics.…
We study the tail behavior of regret in stochastic multi-armed bandits for algorithms that are asymptotically optimal in expectation. While minimizing expected regret is the classical objective, recent work shows that even such algorithms…
Motivated by wireless networks where interference or channel state estimates provide partial insight into throughput, we study a variant of the classical stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in which the learner has limited access to…
In retail, there are predictable yet dramatic time-dependent patterns in customer behavior, such as periodic changes in the number of visitors, or increases in customers just before major holidays. The current paradigm of multi-armed bandit…
Combinatorial online learning is a fundamental task for selecting the optimal action (or super arm) as a combination of base arms in sequential interactions with systems providing stochastic rewards. It is applicable to diverse domains such…