Contextual Bandits with Stage-wise Constraints
Aldo Pacchiano Mohammad Ghavamzadeh Peter Bartlett
We study contextual bandits in the presence of a stage-wise constraint (a
constraint at each round), when the constraint must be satisfied both with high
probability and in expectation. Obviously the setting where the constraint is
in expectation is a relaxation of the one with high probability. We start with
the linear case where both the contextual bandit problem (reward function) and
the stage-wise constraint (cost function) are linear. In each of the high
probability and in expectation settings, we propose an upper-confidence bound
algorithm for the problem and prove a $T$-round regret bound for it. Our
algorithms balance exploration and constraint satisfaction using a novel idea
that scales the radii of the reward and cost confidence sets with different
scaling factors. We also prove a lower-bound for this constrained problem, show
how our algorithms and analyses can be extended to multiple constraints, and
provide simulations to validate our theoretical results. In the high
probability setting, we describe the minimum requirements for the action set in
order for our algorithm to be tractable. In the setting that the constraint is
in expectation, we further specialize our results to multi-armed bandits and
propose a computationally efficient algorithm for this setting with regret
analysis. Finally, we extend our results to the case where the reward and cost
functions are both non-linear. We propose an algorithm for this case and prove
a regret bound for it that characterize the function class complexity by the
eluder dimension.