Related papers: Bandit Algorithms for Tree Search

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 consider stochastic multi-armed bandit problems where the expected reward is a Lipschitz function of the arm, and where the set of arms is either discrete or continuous. For discrete Lipschitz bandits, we derive asymptotic problem…

In the kernelized bandit problem, a learner aims to sequentially compute the optimum of a function lying in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space given only noisy evaluations at sequentially chosen points. In particular, the learner aims to…

In many fields such as digital marketing, healthcare, finance, and robotics, it is common to have a well-tested and reliable baseline policy running in production (e.g., a recommender system). Nonetheless, the baseline policy is often…

One of the key drivers of complexity in the classical (stochastic) multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is the difference between mean rewards in the top two arms, also known as the instance gap. The celebrated Upper Confidence Bound (UCB)…

We study contextual bandits with budget and time constraints, referred to as constrained contextual bandits.The time and budget constraints significantly complicate the exploration and exploitation tradeoff because they introduce complex…

Verification planning is a sequential decision-making problem that specifies a set of verification activities (VA) and correction activities (CA) at different phases of system development. While VAs are used to identify errors and defects,…

We present an extension of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) that strongly increases its efficiency for trees with asymmetry and/or loops. Asymmetric termination of search trees introduces a type of uncertainty for which the standard upper…

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…

Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) methods, such as Upper Confidence Bound applied to Trees (UCT), are instrumental to automated planning techniques. However, UCT can be slow to explore an optimal action when it initially appears inferior to…

The paper proposes a novel upper confidence bound (UCB) procedure for identifying the arm with the largest mean in a multi-armed bandit game in the fixed confidence setting using a small number of total samples. The procedure cannot be…

Algorithm selection is typically based on models of algorithm performance, learned during a separate offline training sequence, which can be prohibitively expensive. In recent work, we adopted an online approach, in which a performance…

We consider bandit optimization of a smooth reward function, where the goal is cumulative regret minimization. This problem has been studied for $\alpha$-H\"older continuous (including Lipschitz) functions with $0<\alpha\leq 1$. Our main…

Many applications require optimizing an unknown, noisy function that is expensive to evaluate. We formalize this task as a multi-armed bandit problem, where the payoff function is either sampled from a Gaussian process (GP) or has low RKHS…

The stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is one of the most fundamental models in sequential decision-making, with the core challenge being the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Although algorithms such as Upper…

Bayesian optimization is a framework for global search via maximum a posteriori updates rather than simulated annealing, and has gained prominence for decision-making under uncertainty. In this work, we cast Bayesian optimization as a…

We establish strong laws of large numbers and central limit theorems for the regret of two of the most popular bandit algorithms: Thompson sampling and UCB. Here, our characterizations of the regret distribution complement the…

Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) typically uses multi-armed bandit (MAB) strategies designed to minimize cumulative regret, such as UCB1, as its selection strategy. However, in the root node of the search tree, it is more sensible to minimize…

Contextual bandits are a rich model for sequential decision making given side information, with important applications, e.g., in recommender systems. We propose novel algorithms for contextual bandits harnessing neural networks to…

This paper considers stochastic linear bandits with general nonlinear constraints. The objective is to maximize the expected cumulative reward over horizon $T$ subject to a set of constraints in each round $\tau\leq T$. We propose a…