Related papers: Concave Statistical Utility Maximization Bandits v…

We study pure exploration in structured stochastic multi-armed bandits, aiming to efficiently identify the correct hypothesis from a finite set of alternatives. For a broad class of tasks, asymptotic analyses reduce to a maximin…

We study the quantitative convergence of drift-diffusion PDEs that arise as Wasserstein gradient flows of linearly convex functions over the space of probability measures on ${\mathbb R}^d$. In this setting, the objective is in general not…

Consider the problem of minimizing the expected value of a (possibly nonconvex) cost function parameterized by a random (vector) variable, when the expectation cannot be computed accurately (e.g., because the statistics of the random…

Policy optimization is among the most popular and successful reinforcement learning algorithms, and there is increasing interest in understanding its theoretical guarantees. In this work, we initiate the study of policy optimization for the…

We study "adversarial scaling", a multi-armed bandit model where rewards have a stochastic and an adversarial component. Our model captures display advertising where the "click-through-rate" can be decomposed to a (fixed across time)…

In this paper, we study the problem of maximizing continuous submodular functions that naturally arise in many learning applications such as those involving utility functions in active learning and sensing, matrix approximations and network…

We study reward maximisation in a wide class of structured stochastic multi-armed bandit problems, where the mean rewards of arms satisfy some given structural constraints, e.g. linear, unimodal, sparse, etc. Our aim is to develop methods…

While there is an extensive body of research analyzing policy gradient methods for discounted cumulative-reward MDPs, prior work on policy gradient methods for average-reward MDPs has been limited, with most existing results restricted to…

Learning good interventions in a causal graph can be modelled as a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with side-information. First, we study this problem when interventions are more expensive than observations and a budget is specified.…

The problem of stochastic convex optimization with bandit feedback (in the learning community) or without knowledge of gradients (in the optimization community) has received much attention in recent years, in the form of algorithms and…

We study contextual bandits in the presence of a stage-wise constraint when the constraint must be satisfied both with high probability and in expectation. We start with the linear case where both the reward function and the stage-wise…

We introduce the "inverse bandit" problem of estimating the rewards of a multi-armed bandit instance from observing the learning process of a low-regret demonstrator. Existing approaches to the related problem of inverse reinforcement…

Stochastic multi-agent multi-armed bandits typically assume that the rewards from each arm follow a fixed distribution, regardless of which agent pulls the arm. However, in many real-world settings, rewards can depend on the sensitivity of…

We investigate the challenging problem of adversarial multi-armed bandits operating under time-varying constraints, a scenario motivated by numerous real-world applications. To address this complex setting, we propose a novel primal-dual…

We study S-shaped utility maximisation with VaR constraint and unobservable drift coefficient. Using the Bayesian filter, the concavification principle, and the change of measure, we give a semi-closed integral representation for the dual…

In practical optimization problems, we typically model uncertainty as a random variable though its true probability distribution is unobservable to the decision maker. Historical data provides some information of this distribution that we…

Uniform sampling of training data has been commonly used in traditional stochastic optimization algorithms such as Proximal Stochastic Gradient Descent (prox-SGD) and Proximal Stochastic Dual Coordinate Ascent (prox-SDCA). Although uniform…

Entropy regularization has been widely used in policy optimization algorithms to enhance exploration and the robustness of the optimal control; however it also introduces an additional regularization bias. This work quantifies the impact of…

Gradient-variation online learning has drawn increasing attention due to its deep connections to game theory, optimization, etc. It has been studied extensively in the full-information setting, but is underexplored with bandit feedback. In…

Scientific experimentation is largely driven by statistical hypothesis testing to determine significant differences in interventions. Traditionally, experimenters allocate samples uniformly between each intervention. However, such an…