Learning to Explore with Lagrangians for Bandits under Unknown Linear Constraints

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Das, Udvas, Basu, Debabrota
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Das, Udvas
Basu, Debabrota
author_facet Das, Udvas
Basu, Debabrota
contents Pure exploration in bandits formalises multiple real-world problems, such as tuning hyper-parameters or conducting user studies to test a set of items, where different safety, resource, and fairness constraints on the decision space naturally appear. We study these problems as pure exploration in multi-armed bandits with unknown linear constraints, where the aim is to identify an $r$-optimal and feasible policy as fast as possible with a given level of confidence. First, we propose a Lagrangian relaxation of the sample complexity lower bound for pure exploration under constraints. Second, we leverage properties of convex optimisation in the Lagrangian lower bound to propose two computationally efficient extensions of Track-and-Stop and Gamified Explorer, namely LATS and LAGEX. Then, we propose a constraint-adaptive stopping rule, and while tracking the lower bound, use optimistic estimate of the feasible set at each step. We show that LAGEX achieves asymptotically optimal sample complexity upper bound, while LATS shows asymptotic optimality up to novel constraint-dependent constants. Finally, we conduct numerical experiments with different reward distributions and constraints that validate efficient performance of LATS and LAGEX.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_18844
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning to Explore with Lagrangians for Bandits under Unknown Linear Constraints
Das, Udvas
Basu, Debabrota
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Methodology
Pure exploration in bandits formalises multiple real-world problems, such as tuning hyper-parameters or conducting user studies to test a set of items, where different safety, resource, and fairness constraints on the decision space naturally appear. We study these problems as pure exploration in multi-armed bandits with unknown linear constraints, where the aim is to identify an $r$-optimal and feasible policy as fast as possible with a given level of confidence. First, we propose a Lagrangian relaxation of the sample complexity lower bound for pure exploration under constraints. Second, we leverage properties of convex optimisation in the Lagrangian lower bound to propose two computationally efficient extensions of Track-and-Stop and Gamified Explorer, namely LATS and LAGEX. Then, we propose a constraint-adaptive stopping rule, and while tracking the lower bound, use optimistic estimate of the feasible set at each step. We show that LAGEX achieves asymptotically optimal sample complexity upper bound, while LATS shows asymptotic optimality up to novel constraint-dependent constants. Finally, we conduct numerical experiments with different reward distributions and constraints that validate efficient performance of LATS and LAGEX.
title Learning to Explore with Lagrangians for Bandits under Unknown Linear Constraints
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.18844