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.
We study the problem of stochastic combinatorial pure exploration (CPE), where an agent sequentially pulls a set of single arms (a.k.a. a super arm) and tries to find the best super arm. Among a variety of problem settings of the CPE, we focus on the full-bandit setting, where we cannot observe the reward of each singl…
Many real-world problems like Social Influence Maximization face the dilemma of choosing the best K out of N options at a given time instant. This setup can be modeled as a combinatorial bandit which chooses K out of N arms at each time, with an aim to achieve an efficient trade-off between exploration and expl…
We study the combinatorial pure exploration problem Best-Set in stochastic multi-armed bandits. In a Best-Set instance, we are given n arms with unknown reward distributions, as well as a family F of feasible subsets over the arms. Our goal is to identify the feasible subset in F with the maxi…
Improved statistical efficiency of Thompson Sampling for combinatorial semi-bandits.
problem Efficiency of policies in stochastic combinatorial multi-armed bandits with semi-bandit feedback.
method Analysis of Combinatorial Thompson Sampling (CTS) using Beta and Gaussian priors for mutually independent and multivariate sub-Gaussian outcomes.
result CTS provides an efficient policy with optimal asymptotic regret for both mutually independent and multivariate sub-Gaussian outcomes.
Study non-linear combinatorial bandits with polynomial rewards, finding significant differences from linear cases.
problem Adversarial combinatorial bandits with general non-linear reward functions.
method Extending existing work on adversarial linear combinatorial bandits, analyzing minimax optimal regret for polynomial and non-polynomial reward functions.
result Minimax optimal regret bounds for adversarial combinatorial bandits with general non-linear reward functions.
This paper investigates stochastic and adversarial combinatorial multi-armed bandit problems. In the stochastic setting under semi-bandit feedback, we derive a problem-specific regret lower bound, and discuss its scaling with the dimension of the decision space. We propose ESCB, an algorithm that efficiently exploits t…
We analyze the regret of combinatorial Thompson sampling (CTS) for the combinatorial multi-armed bandit with probabilistically triggered arms under the semi-bandit feedback setting. We assume that the learner has access to an exact optimization oracle but does not know the expected base arm outcomes beforehand. When th…
A stochastic combinatorial semi-bandit is an online learning problem where at each step a learning agent chooses a subset of ground items subject to combinatorial constraints, and then observes stochastic weights of these items and receives their sum as a payoff. In this paper, we consider efficient learning in large-s…
We study combinatorial multi-armed bandit with probabilistically triggered arms (CMAB-T) and semi-bandit feedback. We resolve a serious issue in the prior CMAB-T studies where the regret bounds contain a possibly exponentially large factor of 1/p∗, where p∗ is the minimum positive probability that an arm is trigg…
This paper tackles combinatorial pure exploration for dueling bandits, aiming to find the best candidate-position match.
problem Finding the best candidate-position match in a dueling bandit setting.
method The paper adapts combinatorial pure exploration for multi-armed bandits to dueling bandits, considering both Borda winner and Condorcet winner cases. It designs PAC and exact algorithms for Borda winner and a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS) for Condorcet winner.
result The paper introduces the first algorithm with polynomial running time per round for identifying the Condorcet winner in CPE-DB.
Algorithm BGLM-OFU minimizes regret in combinatorial causal bandits with binary models.
problem Minimizing expected regret in combinatorial causal bandits with binary generalized linear models.
method BGLM-OFU algorithm based on maximum likelihood estimation for Markovian BGLMs, and causal inference techniques for linear models with hidden variables.
result Achieves O(TlogT) regret for binary generalized linear models.
A matroid is a notion of independence in combinatorial optimization which is closely related to computational efficiency. In particular, it is well known that the maximum of a constrained modular function can be found greedily if and only if the constraints are associated with a matroid. In this paper, we bring togethe…
We revisit the proof by Qin et al. (2014) of bounded regret of the C2UCB contextual combinatorial bandit. We demonstrate an error in the proof of volumetric expansion of the moment matrix, used in upper bounding a function of context vector norms. We prove a relaxed inequality that yields the originally-stated regre…