Biased Dueling Bandits with Stochastic Delayed Feedback

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yi, Bongsoo, Kang, Yue, Li, Yao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Yi, Bongsoo
Kang, Yue
Li, Yao
author_facet Yi, Bongsoo
Kang, Yue
Li, Yao
contents The dueling bandit problem, an essential variation of the traditional multi-armed bandit problem, has become significantly prominent recently due to its broad applications in online advertising, recommendation systems, information retrieval, and more. However, in many real-world applications, the feedback for actions is often subject to unavoidable delays and is not immediately available to the agent. This partially observable issue poses a significant challenge to existing dueling bandit literature, as it significantly affects how quickly and accurately the agent can update their policy on the fly. In this paper, we introduce and examine the biased dueling bandit problem with stochastic delayed feedback, revealing that this new practical problem will delve into a more realistic and intriguing scenario involving a preference bias between the selections. We present two algorithms designed to handle situations involving delay. Our first algorithm, requiring complete delay distribution information, achieves the optimal regret bound for the dueling bandit problem when there is no delay. The second algorithm is tailored for situations where the distribution is unknown, but only the expected value of delay is available. We provide a comprehensive regret analysis for the two proposed algorithms and then evaluate their empirical performance on both synthetic and real datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_14603
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Biased Dueling Bandits with Stochastic Delayed Feedback
Yi, Bongsoo
Kang, Yue
Li, Yao
Machine Learning
The dueling bandit problem, an essential variation of the traditional multi-armed bandit problem, has become significantly prominent recently due to its broad applications in online advertising, recommendation systems, information retrieval, and more. However, in many real-world applications, the feedback for actions is often subject to unavoidable delays and is not immediately available to the agent. This partially observable issue poses a significant challenge to existing dueling bandit literature, as it significantly affects how quickly and accurately the agent can update their policy on the fly. In this paper, we introduce and examine the biased dueling bandit problem with stochastic delayed feedback, revealing that this new practical problem will delve into a more realistic and intriguing scenario involving a preference bias between the selections. We present two algorithms designed to handle situations involving delay. Our first algorithm, requiring complete delay distribution information, achieves the optimal regret bound for the dueling bandit problem when there is no delay. The second algorithm is tailored for situations where the distribution is unknown, but only the expected value of delay is available. We provide a comprehensive regret analysis for the two proposed algorithms and then evaluate their empirical performance on both synthetic and real datasets.
title Biased Dueling Bandits with Stochastic Delayed Feedback
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.14603