Neural Index Policies for Restless Multi-Action Bandits with Heterogeneous Budgets

TL;DR

This paper introduces a neural network-based index policy for complex restless multi-armed bandit problems with multiple actions and heterogeneous budgets, enabling scalable, near-optimal decision-making.

Contribution

It proposes a novel neural index policy framework that unifies index prediction and constrained optimization for multi-action RMABs with heterogeneous budgets.

Findings

Achieves within 5% of oracle performance

Strictly enforces heterogeneous budget constraints

Scales to hundreds of arms efficiently

Abstract

Restless multi-armed bandits (RMABs) provide a scalable framework for sequential decision-making under uncertainty, but classical formulations assume binary actions and a single global budget. Real-world settings, such as healthcare, often involve multiple interventions with heterogeneous costs and constraints, where such assumptions break down. We introduce a Neural Index Policy (NIP) for multi-action RMABs with heterogeneous budget constraints. Our approach learns to assign budget-aware indices to arm--action pairs using a neural network, and converts them into feasible allocations via a differentiable knapsack layer formulated as an entropy-regularized optimal transport (OT) problem. The resulting model unifies index prediction and constrained optimization in a single end-to-end differentiable framework, enabling gradient-based training directly on decision quality. The network is optimized to align its induced occupancy measure with the theoretical upper bound from a linear programming relaxation, bridging asymptotic RMAB theory with practical learning. Empirically, NIP achieves near-optimal performance within 5% of the oracle occupancy-measure policy while strictly enforcing heterogeneous budgets and scaling to hundreds of arms. This work establishes a general, theoretically grounded, and scalable framework for learning index-based policies in complex resource-constrained environments.