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Identifying Copeland Winners in Dueling Bandits With Indifferences

MCML Authors

Viktor Bengs

Dr.

* Former Member

→ Group Eyke Hüllermeier
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Eyke Hüllermeier

Prof. Dr.

Principal Investigator

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Abstract

We consider the task of identifying the Copeland winner(s) in a dueling bandits problem with ternary feedback. This is an underexplored but practically relevant variant of the conventional dueling bandits problem, in which, in addition to strict preference between two arms, one may observe feedback in the form of an indifference. We provide a lower bound on the sample complexity for any learning algorithm finding the Copeland winner(s) with a fixed error probability. Moreover, we propose POCOWISTA, an algorithm with a sample complexity that almost matches this lower bound, and which shows excellent empirical performance, even for the conventional dueling bandits problem. For the case where the preference probabilities satisfy a specific type of stochastic transitivity, we provide a refined version with an improved worst case sample complexity.

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