A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
The Knowledge Gradient (KG) policy was originally proposed for online ranking and selection problems but has recently been adapted for use in online decision making in general and multi-armed bandit problems (MABs) in particular. We study its use in a class of exponential family MABs and identify weaknesses, including …
Neural Index Policy for multi-action bandits with heterogeneous budgets.
problem Real-world settings often involve multiple interventions with heterogeneous costs and constraints, breaking classical assumptions.
method Introduces a Neural Index Policy (NIP) that learns to assign budget-aware indices to arm-action pairs using a neural network and differentiable knapsack layer.
result Empirically achieves near-optimal performance while strictly enforcing heterogeneous budgets and scaling to hundreds of arms.
We consider effort allocation in crowdsourcing, where we wish to assign labeling tasks to imperfect homogeneous crowd workers to maximize overall accuracy in a continuous-time Bayesian setting, subject to budget and time constraints. The Bayes-optimal policy for this problem is the solution to a partially observable Ma…
The paper evaluates index-based allocation policies using data from randomized control trials.
problem Evaluating index-based allocation policies in resource-scarce scenarios.
method Using data from randomized control trials, the paper introduces an efficient estimator and methods for computing asymptotically correct confidence intervals.
result Valid statistical conclusions can be drawn for index-based allocation policies.
The trade-off between the cost of acquiring and processing data, and uncertainty due to a lack of data is fundamental in machine learning. A basic instance of this trade-off is the problem of deciding when to make noisy and costly observations of a discrete-time Gaussian random walk, so as to minimise the posterior var…
We consider a finite-horizon multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem in a Bayesian setting, for which we propose an information relaxation sampling framework. With this framework, we define an intuitive family of control policies that include Thompson sampling (TS) and the Bayesian optimal policy as endpoints. Analogous to TS…
Restless bandit problems are instances of non-stationary multi-armed bandits. These problems have been studied well from the optimization perspective, where the goal is to efficiently find a near-optimal policy when system parameters are known. However, very few papers adopt a learning perspective, where the parameters…
This paper is about index policies for minimizing (frequentist) regret in a stochastic multi-armed bandit model, inspired by a Bayesian view on the problem. Our main contribution is to prove that the Bayes-UCB algorithm, which relies on quantiles of posterior distributions, is asymptotically optimal when the reward dis…
Policy iteration is a family of algorithms that are used to find an optimal policy for a given Markov Decision Problem (MDP). Simple Policy iteration (SPI) is a type of policy iteration where the strategy is to change the policy at exactly one improvable state at every step. Melekopoglou and Condon [1990] showed an exp…
Configuration spaces for computer systems can be challenging for traditional and automatic tuning strategies. Injecting task-specific knowledge into the tuner for a task may allow for more efficient exploration of candidate configurations. We apply this idea to the task of index set selection to accelerate database wor…
We consider the restless Markov bandit problem, in which the state of each arm evolves according to a Markov process independently of the learner's actions. We suggest an algorithm that after T steps achieves O~(T) regret with respect to the best policy that knows the distributions of all arms. No ass…
We introduce in this paper a new algorithm for Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problems. A machine learning paradigm popular within Cognitive Network related topics (e.g., Spectrum Sensing and Allocation). We focus on the case where the rewards are exponentially distributed, which is common when dealing with Rayleigh fading c…
Develops an anytime-valid framework for optimal policy identification from logged contextual bandit data.
problem Selecting the optimal policy from a candidate policy class while monitoring evidence continuously.
method Constructs a time-indexed set that retains the true optimal policy set uniformly over time.
result The procedure allows the analyst to monitor policy values, eliminate clearly suboptimal policies, and stop at data-dependent times without invalidating inference.
The paper uncovers the mathematical structure enabling value decomposition in multi-agent systems.
problem Theoretical justification for why value decomposition works effectively in multi-agent systems remains underexplored.
method The paper introduces the concept of Markov entanglement to measure the underlying structure and demonstrates how it can be used to bound the decomposition error.
result The widely-used class of index policies is weakly entangled and enjoys a sublinear O(N) scale of decomposition error for N-agent systems.
Bayesian optimization with cost-awareness using Gittins index.
problem Optimizing unknown functions with limited data evaluations and costs.
method Developed a connection between cost-aware Bayesian optimization and the Pandora's Box problem, using the Gittins index as an acquisition function.
result The Gittins index-based acquisition function performs well in cost-aware Bayesian optimization, especially in high dimensions.
This paper proposes a general framework of multi-armed bandit (MAB) processes by introducing a type of restrictions on the switches among arms evolving in continuous time. The Gittins index process is constructed for any single arm subject to the restrictions on switches and then the optimality of the corresponding Git…
Extracting market expectations has always been an important issue when making national policies and investment decisions in financial markets. In option markets, the most popular way has been to extract implied volatilities to assess the future variability of the underlying with the use of the Black and Scholes formula…