Multi-agent Multi-armed Bandits with Minimum Reward Guarantee Fairness

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Manupriya, Piyushi, Himanshu, Jagarlapudi, SakethaNath, Ghalme, Ganesh
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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_version_ 1866916799924142080
author Manupriya, Piyushi
Himanshu
Jagarlapudi, SakethaNath
Ghalme, Ganesh
author_facet Manupriya, Piyushi
Himanshu
Jagarlapudi, SakethaNath
Ghalme, Ganesh
contents We investigate the problem of maximizing social welfare while ensuring fairness in a multi-agent multi-armed bandit (MA-MAB) setting. In this problem, a centralized decision-maker takes actions over time, generating random rewards for various agents. Our goal is to maximize the sum of expected cumulative rewards, a.k.a. social welfare, while ensuring that each agent receives an expected reward that is at least a constant fraction of the maximum possible expected reward. Our proposed algorithm, RewardFairUCB, leverages the Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) technique to achieve sublinear regret bounds for both fairness and social welfare. The fairness regret measures the positive difference between the minimum reward guarantee and the expected reward of a given policy, whereas the social welfare regret measures the difference between the social welfare of the optimal fair policy and that of the given policy. We show that RewardFairUCB algorithm achieves instance-independent social welfare regret guarantees of $\tilde{O}(T^{1/2})$ and a fairness regret upper bound of $\tilde{O}(T^{3/4})$. We also give the lower bound of $Ω(\sqrt{T})$ for both social welfare and fairness regret. We evaluate RewardFairUCB's performance against various baseline and heuristic algorithms using simulated data and real world data, highlighting trade-offs between fairness and social welfare regrets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_15240
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multi-agent Multi-armed Bandits with Minimum Reward Guarantee Fairness
Manupriya, Piyushi
Himanshu
Jagarlapudi, SakethaNath
Ghalme, Ganesh
Machine Learning
Systems and Control
We investigate the problem of maximizing social welfare while ensuring fairness in a multi-agent multi-armed bandit (MA-MAB) setting. In this problem, a centralized decision-maker takes actions over time, generating random rewards for various agents. Our goal is to maximize the sum of expected cumulative rewards, a.k.a. social welfare, while ensuring that each agent receives an expected reward that is at least a constant fraction of the maximum possible expected reward. Our proposed algorithm, RewardFairUCB, leverages the Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) technique to achieve sublinear regret bounds for both fairness and social welfare. The fairness regret measures the positive difference between the minimum reward guarantee and the expected reward of a given policy, whereas the social welfare regret measures the difference between the social welfare of the optimal fair policy and that of the given policy. We show that RewardFairUCB algorithm achieves instance-independent social welfare regret guarantees of $\tilde{O}(T^{1/2})$ and a fairness regret upper bound of $\tilde{O}(T^{3/4})$. We also give the lower bound of $Ω(\sqrt{T})$ for both social welfare and fairness regret. We evaluate RewardFairUCB's performance against various baseline and heuristic algorithms using simulated data and real world data, highlighting trade-offs between fairness and social welfare regrets.
title Multi-agent Multi-armed Bandits with Minimum Reward Guarantee Fairness
topic Machine Learning
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15240