Towards Data Science

Introduction to Reinforcement Learning: Multi-Armed Bandit Simulation in Python

The article titled "Introduction to Reinforcement Learning: Multi-Armed Bandit Simulation in Python" explains how machines can learn independently. It focuses on a practical simulation of the multi-armed bandit problem using Python. The post was published on the Towards Data Science platform.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Bandit Simulation for Average Reward Inference

arXiv:2606. 00913v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-arm bandit algorithms are increasingly used in online platforms, clinical trials, and social science experiments, but valid statistical inference on their performance remains an open challenge.

By Samya Praharaj, Chih-Yu Chang, Koulik Khamaru, Kelly W. Zhang
arXiv AI
Jun 30

Exploration and Online Transfer with Behavioral Foundation Models

arXiv:2606. 29980v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Zero-shot Transfer in Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to train an agent that can generate optimal policies for any reward function, without additional learning at transfer time, while training only on reward-free trajectories.

By Louis Bagot (SyCoSMA), Mathieu Lefort (LIRIS, SyCoSMA, IRISA, MALT, UR), La\"etitia Matignon (SyCoSMA)
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 19

Empirical Bayesian Multi-Bandit Learning

The paper introduces a hierarchical Bayesian framework for multi-task contextual bandits, capturing both heterogeneity and correlations among bandit instances. It proposes an empirical Bayesian method to estimate the covariance matrix of the prior, leading to two new algorithms—ebmTS and ebmUCB—that incorporate this prior into decision making. The authors provide frequentist regret bounds and show through synthetic and real-world experiments that these algorithms outperform existing methods, especially in complex settings.

By Xia Jiang, Rong J. B. Zhu