解决隐状态动态的上下文多臂老虎机问题,提出周期更新参数的新方法。
A Direct Approach for Handling Contextual Bandits with Latent State Dynamics

- 基于隐马尔可夫模型,设计周期更新参数的算法应对状态依赖性。
- 理论证明在遗忘条件下可实现与经典线性模型相当的后悔界。
- 适合研究复杂环境下的在线决策与强化学习中的状态建模场景。
我们研究一种线性上下文多臂老虎机模型,其中上下文和奖励由有限隐马尔可夫链(HMM)控制。首先回顾Nelson等人(2022)提出的简化模型,该模型中奖励是给定观测上下文后对隐状态后验概率(称为信念)的线性函数,而非直接依赖于隐状态本身。此简化模型可通过直接归约为标准线性上下文多臂老虎机来处理。我们扩展了该归约的理论分析,将HMM参数估计误差纳入后悔界,并给出不依赖于奖励函数、仅通过HMM参数估计的高概率边界。其次,更重要的是,我们研究更自然且更复杂的模型,包含隐状态间的直接依赖关系(除了与观测上下文的依赖,这是上下文多臂老虎机的自然设定)。在经典的HMM遗忘条件下,为应对奖励结构带来的多重统计依赖,主要算法工具是仅周期性更新奖励模型参数。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
We consider a linear contextual bandit model where contexts and rewards are governed by a finite hidden Markov chain. We first revisit the simplified model by Nelson et al. (2022), in which rewards are linear functions of the posterior probabilities over the hidden states given the observed contexts (called beliefs), rather than functions of the hidden states themselves. This simplified model may be handled through a direct reduction to standard linear contextual bandits. We extend the theoretical analysis of this reduction to take into account the estimation of the parameters of the hidden Markov model [HMM] in the regret bound and to provide high-probability bounds not depending anymore on the reward functions and only depending on the model through the estimation of the HMM parameters. Second, and most importantly, we instead study the more natural and more complex model incorporating direct dependencies in the hidden states (on top of dependencies on the observed contexts, as is natural for contextual bandits). Under a classic HMM forgetting condition, the main algorithmic tool introduced to cope with the various statistical dependencies that the reward structure introduces is to only periodically update reward-model parameters.
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