On Lai's Upper Confidence Bound in Multi-Armed Bandits

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ren, Huachen, Zhang, Cun-Hui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Ren, Huachen
Zhang, Cun-Hui
author_facet Ren, Huachen
Zhang, Cun-Hui
contents In this memorial paper, we honor Tze Leung Lai's seminal contributions to the topic of multi-armed bandits, with a specific focus on his pioneering work on the upper confidence bound. We establish sharp non-asymptotic regret bounds for an upper confidence bound index with a constant level of exploration for Gaussian rewards. Furthermore, we establish a non-asymptotic regret bound for the upper confidence bound index of Lai (1987) which employs an exploration function that decreases with the sample size of the corresponding arm. The regret bounds have leading constants that match the Lai-Robbins lower bound. Our results highlight an aspect of Lai's seminal works that deserves more attention in the machine learning literature.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_02279
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On Lai's Upper Confidence Bound in Multi-Armed Bandits
Ren, Huachen
Zhang, Cun-Hui
Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
62L05, 62L10 (Primary) 68T05 (Secondary)
In this memorial paper, we honor Tze Leung Lai's seminal contributions to the topic of multi-armed bandits, with a specific focus on his pioneering work on the upper confidence bound. We establish sharp non-asymptotic regret bounds for an upper confidence bound index with a constant level of exploration for Gaussian rewards. Furthermore, we establish a non-asymptotic regret bound for the upper confidence bound index of Lai (1987) which employs an exploration function that decreases with the sample size of the corresponding arm. The regret bounds have leading constants that match the Lai-Robbins lower bound. Our results highlight an aspect of Lai's seminal works that deserves more attention in the machine learning literature.
title On Lai's Upper Confidence Bound in Multi-Armed Bandits
topic Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
62L05, 62L10 (Primary) 68T05 (Secondary)
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02279