This book provides an introductory, textbook-like treatment of multi-armed bandits. It covers various algorithms and techniques for decision-making under uncertainty, with a focus on theoretical foundations and practical applications.
* **Multi-Armed Bandit Framework:** The document introduces the core concept of multi-armed bandits – a model for decision-making under uncertainty, often used as a simplified starting point for more complex reinforcement learning problems.
* **Applications:** It highlights several applications, including news website optimization, dynamic pricing, and medical trials.
* **Key Concepts:** Defines crucial concepts like arms, rewards, regret, exploration vs. exploitation, and different feedback mechanisms (bandit, full, partial).
* **Algorithms:** Presents and analyzes simple algorithms like Explore-First and Epsilon-Greedy.
* **Regret Bounds:** Focuses heavily on bounding the regret of these algorithms, which measures how much worse the algorithm performs compared to always choosing the best arm.
* **Adaptive Exploration:** Introduces the idea of improving performance through adaptive exploration strategies (adjusting exploration based on observed rewards).
* **Clean Event:** Introduces the concept of the "clean event" to simplify analysis by focusing on high probability events.
* **Table of Contents:** Shows a detailed table of contents, indicating the breadth of topics covered in the full book including Bayesian Bandits, Contextual bandits, Adversarial bandits and connection with economics.
* **Multi-Armed Bandit Framework:** The document introduces the core concept of multi-armed bandits – a model for decision-making under uncertainty, often used as a simplified starting point for more complex reinforcement learning problems.
* **Applications:** It highlights several applications, including news website optimization, dynamic pricing, and medical trials.
* **Key Concepts:** Defines crucial concepts like arms, rewards, regret, exploration vs. exploitation, and different feedback mechanisms (bandit, full, partial).
* **Algorithms:** Presents and analyzes simple algorithms like Explore-First and Epsilon-Greedy.
* **Regret Bounds:** Focuses heavily on bounding the regret of these algorithms, which measures how much worse the algorithm performs compared to always choosing the best arm.
* **Adaptive Exploration:** Introduces the idea of improving performance through adaptive exploration strategies (adjusting exploration based on observed rewards).
* **Clean Event:** Introduces the concept of the "clean event" to simplify analysis by focusing on high probability events.
* **Table of Contents:** Shows a detailed table of contents, indicating the breadth of topics covered in the full book including Bayesian Bandits, Contextual bandits, Adversarial bandits and connection with economics.
A new paper demonstrates that the simplex method, a widely used optimization algorithm, is as efficient as it can be, and explains why it performs well in practice despite theoretical limitations.
Alan Turing and John von Neumann saw it early: the logic of life and the logic of code may be one and the same. This article explores the idea that life, at its core, might be computational, drawing parallels between DNA, computation, and the work of Turing and von Neumann.
PhD student Sarah Alnegheimish is developing Orion, an open-source, user-friendly machine learning framework for detecting anomalies in large-scale industrial and operational settings. She focuses on making machine learning systems accessible, transparent, and trustworthy, and is exploring repurposing pre-trained models for anomaly detection.
This discussion explores the effectiveness of simulated annealing compared to random search for optimizing a set of 16 integer parameters. The author seeks to determine if simulated annealing provides a significant advantage over random search, despite the parameter space being too large for exhaustive search. Responses suggest plotting performance over time and highlight the ability of simulated annealing to escape local optima as its main strength.
In this paper, we revisit one of the simplest problems in data structures: the task of inserting elements into an open-addressed hash table so that elements can later be retrieved with as few probes as possible. We show that, even without reordering elements over time, it is possible to construct a hash table that achieves far better expected search complexities (both amortized and worst-case) than were previously thought possible. Along the way, we disprove the central conjecture left by Yao in his seminal paper 'Uniform Hashing is Optimal'. All of our results come with matching lower bounds.
