1,070 research outputs found
Budgeted Multi-Armed Bandits with Asymmetric Confidence Intervals
We study the stochastic Budgeted Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem, where a
player chooses from arms with unknown expected rewards and costs. The goal
is to maximize the total reward under a budget constraint. A player thus seeks
to choose the arm with the highest reward-cost ratio as often as possible.
Current state-of-the-art policies for this problem have several issues, which
we illustrate. To overcome them, we propose a new upper confidence bound (UCB)
sampling policy, -UCB, that uses asymmetric confidence intervals. These
intervals scale with the distance between the sample mean and the bounds of a
random variable, yielding a more accurate and tight estimation of the
reward-cost ratio compared to our competitors. We show that our approach has
logarithmic regret and consistently outperforms existing policies in synthetic
and real settings
Asymptotically Optimal Algorithms for Budgeted Multiple Play Bandits
We study a generalization of the multi-armed bandit problem with multiple
plays where there is a cost associated with pulling each arm and the agent has
a budget at each time that dictates how much she can expect to spend. We derive
an asymptotic regret lower bound for any uniformly efficient algorithm in our
setting. We then study a variant of Thompson sampling for Bernoulli rewards and
a variant of KL-UCB for both single-parameter exponential families and bounded,
finitely supported rewards. We show these algorithms are asymptotically
optimal, both in rateand leading problem-dependent constants, including in the
thick margin setting where multiple arms fall on the decision boundary
An Incentive Compatible Multi-Armed-Bandit Crowdsourcing Mechanism with Quality Assurance
Consider a requester who wishes to crowdsource a series of identical binary
labeling tasks to a pool of workers so as to achieve an assured accuracy for
each task, in a cost optimal way. The workers are heterogeneous with unknown
but fixed qualities and their costs are private. The problem is to select for
each task an optimal subset of workers so that the outcome obtained from the
selected workers guarantees a target accuracy level. The problem is a
challenging one even in a non strategic setting since the accuracy of
aggregated label depends on unknown qualities. We develop a novel multi-armed
bandit (MAB) mechanism for solving this problem. First, we propose a framework,
Assured Accuracy Bandit (AAB), which leads to an MAB algorithm, Constrained
Confidence Bound for a Non Strategic setting (CCB-NS). We derive an upper bound
on the number of time steps the algorithm chooses a sub-optimal set that
depends on the target accuracy level and true qualities. A more challenging
situation arises when the requester not only has to learn the qualities of the
workers but also elicit their true costs. We modify the CCB-NS algorithm to
obtain an adaptive exploration separated algorithm which we call { \em
Constrained Confidence Bound for a Strategic setting (CCB-S)}. CCB-S algorithm
produces an ex-post monotone allocation rule and thus can be transformed into
an ex-post incentive compatible and ex-post individually rational mechanism
that learns the qualities of the workers and guarantees a given target accuracy
level in a cost optimal way. We provide a lower bound on the number of times
any algorithm should select a sub-optimal set and we see that the lower bound
matches our upper bound upto a constant factor. We provide insights on the
practical implementation of this framework through an illustrative example and
we show the efficacy of our algorithms through simulations
Adaptive Policies for Sequential Sampling under Incomplete Information and a Cost Constraint
We consider the problem of sequential sampling from a finite number of
independent statistical populations to maximize the expected infinite horizon
average outcome per period, under a constraint that the expected average
sampling cost does not exceed an upper bound. The outcome distributions are not
known. We construct a class of consistent adaptive policies, under which the
average outcome converges with probability 1 to the true value under complete
information for all distributions with finite means. We also compare the rate
of convergence for various policies in this class using simulation
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