UAI 2022poster24 citations

An explore-then-commit algorithm for submodular maximization under full-bandit feedback

Guanyu Nie, Mridul Agarwal, Abhishek Kumar Umrawal, Vaneet Aggarwal, Christopher John Quinn

Abstract

We investigate the problem of combinatorial multi-armed bandits with stochastic submodular (in expectation) rewards and full-bandit feedback, where no extra information other than the reward of selected action at each time step $t$ is observed. We propose a simple algorithm, Explore-Then-Commit Greedy (ETCG) and prove that it achieves a $(1-1/e)$-regret upper bound of $\mathcal{O}(n^\frac{1}{3}k^\frac{4}{3}T^\frac{2}{3}\log(T)^\frac{1}{2})$ for a horizon $T$, number of base elements $n$, and cardinality constraint $k$. We also show in experiments with synthetic and real-world data that the ETCG empirically outperforms other full-bandit methods.

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v180-nie22a,
  title = 	 {An explore-then-commit algorithm for submodular maximization under full-bandit feedback},
  author =       {Nie, Guanyu and Agarwal, Mridul and Umrawal, Abhishek Kumar and Aggarwal, Vaneet and John Quinn, Christopher},
  booktitle = 	 {Proceedings of the Thirty-Eighth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence},
  pages = 	 {1541--1551},
  year = 	 {2022},
  editor = 	 {Cussens, James and Zhang, Kun},
  volume = 	 {180},
  series = 	 {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  month = 	 {01--05 Aug},
  publisher =    {PMLR},
  pdf = 	 {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v180/nie22a/nie22a.pdf},
  url = 	 {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v180/nie22a.html},
  abstract = 	 {We investigate the problem of combinatorial multi-armed bandits with stochastic submodular (in expectation) rewards and full-bandit feedback, where no extra information other than the reward of selected action at each time step $t$ is observed. We propose a simple algorithm, Explore-Then-Commit Greedy (ETCG) and prove that it achieves a $(1-1/e)$-regret upper bound of $\mathcal{O}(n^\frac{1}{3}k^\frac{4}{3}T^\frac{2}{3}\log(T)^\frac{1}{2})$ for a horizon $T$, number of base elements $n$, and cardinality constraint $k$. We also show in experiments with synthetic and real-world data that the ETCG empirically outperforms other full-bandit methods.}
}