Skip to main content

Copeland Dueling Bandits

Masrour Zoghi‚ Zohar Karnin‚ Shimon Whiteson and Maarten de Rijke

Abstract

A version of the dueling bandit problem is addressed in which a Condorcet winner may not exist. Two algorithms are proposed that instead seek to minimize regret with respect to the Copeland winner, which, unlike the Condorcet winner, is guaranteed to exist. The first, Copeland Confidence Bound (CCB), is designed for small numbers of arms, while the second, Scalable Copeland Bandits (SCB), works better for large-scale problems. We provide theoretical results bounding the regret accumulated by CCB and SCB, both substantially improving existing results. Such existing results either offer bounds of the form O(K log T) but require restrictive assumptions, or offer bounds of the form O(K^2 log T) without requiring such assumptions. Our results offer the best of both worlds: O(K log T) bounds without restrictive assumptions.

Book Title
NeurIPS 2015: Proceedings of the Twenty−Ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
Month
December
Year
2015