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In this report, we survey Bayesian Optimization methods focussed on the Multi-Armed Bandit Problem. We take the help of the paper "Portfolio Allocation for Bayesian Optimization". We report a small literature survey on the acquisition…
We propose a bandit algorithm that explores purely by randomizing its past observations. In particular, the sufficient optimism in the mean reward estimates is achieved by exploiting the variance in the past observed rewards. We name the…
Most learning to rank research has assumed that the utility of different documents is independent, which results in learned ranking functions that return redundant results. The few approaches that avoid this have rather unsatisfyingly…
Despite the recent success of representation learning in sequential decision making, the study of the pure exploration scenario (i.e., identify the best option and minimize the sample complexity) is still limited. In this paper, we study…
Exploration is a crucial aspect of bandit and reinforcement learning algorithms. The uncertainty quantification necessary for exploration often comes from either closed-form expressions based on simple models or resampling and posterior…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a classic example of the exploration-exploitation dilemma. It is concerned with maximising the total rewards for a gambler by sequentially pulling an arm from a multi-armed slot machine where each arm…
We consider the query recommendation problem in closed loop interactive learning settings like online information gathering and exploratory analytics. The problem can be naturally modelled using the Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) framework with…
This paper introduces a general multi-agent bandit model in which each agent is facing a finite set of arms and may communicate with other agents through a central controller in order to identify, in pure exploration, or play, in regret…
Selecting the best large language model (LLM) for a fixed benchmark is often expensive, since exhaustive evaluation requires running every model on every example. Multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms can reduce the number of LLM calls by…
Best-arm identification (BAI) in a fixed-budget setting is a bandit problem where the learning agent maximizes the probability of identifying the optimal (best) arm after a fixed number of observations. Most works on this topic study…
Fast changing states or volatile environments pose a significant challenge to online optimization, which needs to perform rapid adaptation under limited observation. In this paper, we give query and regret optimal bandit algorithms under…
Sequential decision-making algorithms such as multi-armed bandits can find optimal personalized decisions, but are notoriously sample-hungry. In personalized medicine, for example, training a bandit from scratch for every patient is…
Clustering is a ubiquitous task in data science. Compared to the commonly used $k$-means clustering, $k$-medoids clustering requires the cluster centers to be actual data points and support arbitrary distance metrics, which permits greater…
Large Language Models (LLMs) can self-improve through reinforcement learning, where they generate trajectories to explore and discover better solutions. However, this exploration process is computationally expensive, often forcing current…
Customized static operator design has enabled widespread application of Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs), but their search effectiveness often deteriorates as evolutionary progresses. Dynamic operator configuration approaches attempt to…
Test-time scaling has become a dominant paradigm for improving LLM agent reliability, yet current approaches treat compute as an abundant resource, allowing agents to exhaust token and tool budgets on redundant steps or dead-end…
We consider the problem of model selection for two popular stochastic linear bandit settings, and propose algorithms that adapts to the unknown problem complexity. In the first setting, we consider the $K$ armed mixture bandits, where the…
Contextual dueling bandit is used to model the bandit problems, where a learner's goal is to find the best arm for a given context using observed noisy human preference feedback over the selected arms for the past contexts. However,…
We study online learning with bandit feedback across multiple tasks, with the goal of improving average performance across tasks if they are similar according to some natural task-similarity measure. As the first to target the adversarial…
Although many algorithms for the multi-armed bandit problem are well-understood theoretically, empirical confirmation of their effectiveness is generally scarce. This paper presents a thorough empirical study of the most popular multi-armed…