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In building practical applications of evolutionary computation (EC), two optimizations are essential. First, the parameters of the search method need to be tuned to the domain in order to balance exploration and exploitation effectively.…
We study exploration in stochastic multi-armed bandits when we have access to a divisible resource that can be allocated in varying amounts to arm pulls. We focus in particular on the allocation of distributed computing resources, where we…
We consider a bandit problem where the buget is smaller than the number of arms, which may be infinite. In this regime, the usual objective in the literature is to minimize simple regret. To analyze broad classes of distributions with…
Despite their success in many domains, large language models (LLMs) remain under-studied in scenarios requiring optimal decision-making under uncertainty. This is crucial as many real-world applications, ranging from personalized…
Scaling test-time compute has emerged as an effective strategy for improving the performance of large language models. However, existing methods typically allocate compute uniformly across all queries, overlooking variation in query…
Large language models (LLMs) have been adopted to solve sequential decision-making tasks such as multi-armed bandits (MAB), in which an LLM is directly instructed to select the arms to pull in every iteration. However, this paradigm of…
Conversion rate optimization means designing web interfaces such that more visitors perform a desired action (such as register or purchase) on the site. One promising approach, implemented in Sentient Ascend, is to optimize the design using…
Behaviour Change Techniques (BCTs) are central to digital health interventions, yet selecting and delivering effective techniques remains challenging. Contextual bandits enable statistically grounded optimisation of BCT selection, while…
Despite the great interest in the bandit problem, designing efficient algorithms for complex models remains challenging, as there is typically no analytical way to quantify uncertainty. In this paper, we propose Multiplier Bootstrap-based…
In a fixed-confidence pure exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits, an algorithm iteratively samples arms and should stop as early as possible and return the correct answer to a query about the arms distributions. We are…
Determining what experience to generate to best facilitate learning (i.e. exploration) is one of the distinguishing features and open challenges in reinforcement learning. The advent of distributed agents that interact with parallel…
In the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem, there is a given set of arms with unknown reward models. At each time, a player selects one arm to play, aiming to maximize the total expected reward over a horizon of length T. An approach based on…
While Large Language Models (LLMs) hold promise to become autonomous agents, they often explore suboptimally in sequential decision-making. Recent work has sought to enhance this capability via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement…
Automated algorithm selection and hyperparameter tuning facilitates the application of machine learning. Traditional multi-armed bandit strategies look to the history of observed rewards to identify the most promising arms for optimizing…
We study the non-stationary stochastic multiarmed bandit (MAB) problem and propose two generic algorithms, namely, the limited memory deterministic sequencing of exploration and exploitation (LM-DSEE) and the Sliding-Window Upper Confidence…
The multi-armed bandit(MAB) is a classical sequential decision problem. Most work requires assumptions about the reward distribution (e.g., bounded), while practitioners may have difficulty obtaining information about these distributions to…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate or automate human behavior in complex sequential decision-making settings. A natural question is then whether LLMs exhibit similar decision-making behavior to humans, and can…
The stochastic multi-armed bandit setting has been recently studied in the non-stationary regime, where the mean payoff of each action is a non-decreasing function of the number of rounds passed since it was last played. This model captures…
We propose the first fully-adaptive algorithm for pure exploration in linear bandits---the task to find the arm with the largest expected reward, which depends on an unknown parameter linearly. While existing methods partially or entirely…
Multi-armed bandits are a quintessential machine learning problem requiring the balancing of exploration and exploitation. While there has been progress in developing algorithms with strong theoretical guarantees, there has been less focus…