Global Rewards in Restless Multi-Armed Bandits

Neural Information Processing Systems 

We prove approximation bounds but also point out how these indices could fail when reward functions are highly non-linear. To overcome this, we propose two sets of adaptive policies: the first computes indices iteratively, and the second combines indices with Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). Empirically, we demonstrate that our proposed policies outperform baselines and index-based policies with synthetic data and real-world data from food rescue.