Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: A Farewell to Arms: Sequential Reward Maximization on a Budget with a
  Giving Up Option   We consider a sequential decision-making problem where an agent can take one
action at a time and each action has a stochastic temporal extent, i.e., a new
action cannot be taken until the previous one is finished. Upon completion, the
chosen action yields a stochastic reward. The agent seeks to maximize its
cumulative reward over a finite time budget, with the option of "giving up" on
a current action -- hence forfeiting any reward -- in order to choose another
action. We cast this problem as a variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandits
problem with stochastic consumption of resource. For this problem, we first
establish that the optimal arm is the one that maximizes the ratio of the
expected reward of the arm to the expected waiting time before the agent sees
the reward due to pulling that arm. Using a novel upper confidence bound on
this ratio, we then introduce an upper confidence based-algorithm, WAIT-UCB,
for which we establish logarithmic, problem-dependent regret bound which has an
improved dependence on problem parameters compared to previous works.
Simulations on various problem configurations comparing WAIT-UCB against the
state-of-the-art algorithms are also presented.

28
The categories of this paper are: alg-geom
21
The categories of this paper are: adap-org
26
The categories of this paper are: bayes-an
35
The categories of this paper are: mtrl-th
7
The categories of this paper are: hep-th
6
The categories of this paper are: astro-ph
20
The categories of this paper are: acc-phys
5
The categories of this paper are: gr-qc
24
The categories of this paper are: dg-ga
2
The categories of this paper are: math
19
The categories of this paper are: eess
37
The categories of this paper are: supr-con
15
The categories of this paper are: nucl-ex
9
The categories of this paper are: nlin
25
The categories of this paper are: patt-sol
13
The categories of this paper are: quant-ph