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Register a new userQuantile Multi-Armed Bandits: Optimal Best-Arm Identification and a Differentially Private Scheme
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We study the best-arm identification problem in multi-armed bandits with stochastic, potentially private rewards, when the goal is to identify the arm with the highest quantile at a fixed, prescribed level. First, we propose a (non-private) successive elimination algorithm for strictly optimal best-arm identification, we show that our algorithm is $delta$-PAC and we characterize its sample complexity. Further, we provide a lower bound on the expected number of pulls, showing that the proposed algorithm is essentially optimal up to logarithmic factors. Both upper and lower complexity bounds depend on a special definition of the associated suboptimality gap, designed in particular for the quantile bandit problem, as we show when the gap approaches zero, best-arm identification is impossible. Second, motivated by applications where the rewards are private, we provide a differentially private successive elimination algorithm whose sample complexity is finite even for distributions with infinite support-size, and we characterize its sample complexity. Our algorithms do not require prior knowledge of either the suboptimality gap or other statistical information related to the bandit problem at hand.
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We consider the best-arm identification problem in multi-armed bandits, which focuses purely on exploration. A player is given a fixed budget to explore a finite set of arms, and the rewards of each arm are drawn independently from a fixed, unknown distribution. The player aims to identify the arm with the largest expected reward. We propose a general framework to unify sequential elimination algorithms, where the arms are dismissed iteratively until a unique arm is left. Our analysis reveals a novel performance measure expressed in terms of the sampling mechanism and number of eliminated arms at each round. Based on this result, we develop an algorithm that divides the budget according to a nonlinear function of remaining arms at each round. We provide theoretical guarantees for the algorithm, characterizing the suitable nonlinearity for different problem environments described by the number of competitive arms. Matching the theoretical results, our experiments show that the nonlinear algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art. We finally study the side-observation model, where pulling an arm reveals the rewards of its related arms, and we establish improved theoretical guarantees in the pure-exploration setting.
We propose a generalization of the best arm identification problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB) to the setting where every pull of an arm is associated with delayed feedback. The delay in feedback increases the effective sample complexity of standard algorithms, but can be offset if we have access to partial feedback received before a pull is completed. We propose a general framework to model the relationship between partial and delayed feedback, and as a special case we introduce efficient algorithms for settings where the partial feedback are biased or unbiased estimators of the delayed feedback. Additionally, we propose a novel extension of the algorithms to the parallel MAB setting where an agent can control a batch of arms. Our experiments in real-world settings, involving policy search and hyperparameter optimization in computational sustainability domains for fast charging of batteries and wildlife corridor construction, demonstrate that exploiting the structure of partial feedback can lead to significant improvements over baselines in both sequential and parallel MAB.
In this paper we study the problem of stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB) in the (local) differential privacy (DP/LDP) model. Unlike the previous results which need to assume bounded reward distributions, here we mainly focus on the case the reward distribution of each arm only has $(1+v)$-th moment with some $vin (0, 1]$. In the first part, we study the problem in the central $epsilon$-DP model. We first provide a near-optimal result by developing a private and robust Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithm. Then, we improve the result via a private and robust version of the Successive Elimination (SE) algorithm. Finally, we show that the instance-dependent regret bound of our improved algorithm is optimal by showing its lower bound. In the second part of the paper, we study the problem in the $epsilon$-LDP model. We propose an algorithm which could be seen as locally private and robust version of the SE algorithm, and show it could achieve (near) optimal rates for both instance-dependent and instance-independent regrets. All of the above results can also reveal the differences between the problem of private MAB with bounded rewards and heavy-tailed rewards. To achieve these (near) optimal rates, we develop several new hard instances and private robust estimators as byproducts, which might could be used to other related problems. Finally, experimental results also support our theoretical analysis and show the effectiveness of our algorithms.
We give an $(varepsilon,delta)$-differentially private algorithm for the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem in the shuffle model with a distribution-dependent regret of $Oleft(left(sum_{ain [k]:Delta_a>0}frac{log T}{Delta_a}right)+frac{ksqrt{logfrac{1}{delta}}log T}{varepsilon}right)$, and a distribution-independent regret of $Oleft(sqrt{kTlog T}+frac{ksqrt{logfrac{1}{delta}}log T}{varepsilon}right)$, where $T$ is the number of rounds, $Delta_a$ is the suboptimality gap of the arm $a$, and $k$ is the total number of arms. Our upper bound almost matches the regret of the best known algorithms for the centralized model, and significantly outperforms the best known algorithm in the local model.
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 improved in the sense that the number of samples required to identify the best arm is within a constant factor of a lower bound based on the law of the iterated logarithm (LIL). Inspired by the LIL, we construct our confidence bounds to explicitly account for the infinite time horizon of the algorithm. In addition, by using a novel stopping time for the algorithm we avoid a union bound over the arms that has been observed in other UCB-type algorithms. We prove that the algorithm is optimal up to constants and also show through simulations that it provides superior performance with respect to the state-of-the-art.
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