Leveraging Similarities in Multi-Armed Bandits
Poster B: Monday -- 16:00 - 18:00
Khaled Eldowa, Thibaud Rahier, Augustin Cablant, Panayotis Mertikopoulos, Pierre Gaillard
Keywords: Online Learning, Structured Bandits, Multi-Point Feedback, Best-of-Both-Worlds
In many online learning and bandit problems, the actions we consider possess inherent similarities -- for instance because they share latent traits, tags, or hierarchical structure. We study online learning with a similarity-structured action set, encoded by a rooted tree whose leaves are the actions and whose levels quantify how closely two actions are related. The loss sequence is assumed tree-compatible: losses of similar actions are constrained to be close. We establish an impossibility result showing that usual one-point bandit feedback cannot, in general, leverage range or tree-induced similarity, even under very strong similarity constraints. We then provide a unified set of algorithms which adapt to a wide range of richer feedback models, from semi-bandit feedback down to multi-point bandit protocols, including the minimal two-point feedback setting. We show these algorithms exhibit best-of-both-world guarantees and provably exploit action similarities by replacing the number of actions $K$ by a similarity-aware effective number of actions $K_{\mathrm{eff}}$ in the regret bounds.