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We consider the discrete time infinite horizon average reward restless markovian bandit (RMAB) problem. We propose a \emph{model predictive control} based non-stationary policy with a rolling computational horizon $\tau$. At each time-slot,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-06 Nicolas Gast , Dheeraj Narasimha

LLMs are increasingly used to design reward functions based on human preferences in Reinforcement Learning (RL). We focus on LLM-designed rewards for Restless Multi-Armed Bandits, a framework for allocating limited resources among agents.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Shresth Verma , Niclas Boehmer , Lingkai Kong , Milind Tambe

Restless multi-arm bandits (RMABs), a class of resource allocation problems with broad application in areas such as healthcare, online advertising, and anti-poaching, have recently been studied from a multi-agent reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Yunfan Zhao , Nikhil Behari , Edward Hughes , Edwin Zhang , Dheeraj Nagaraj , Karl Tuyls , Aparna Taneja , Milind Tambe

We propose stochastic rank-$1$ bandits, a class of online learning problems where at each step a learning agent chooses a pair of row and column arms, and receives the product of their values as a reward. The main challenge of the problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-09 Sumeet Katariya , Branislav Kveton , Csaba Szepesvari , Claire Vernade , Zheng Wen

The piecewise-stationary bandit problem is an important variant of the multi-armed bandit problem that further considers abrupt changes in the reward distributions. The main theme of the problem is the trade-off between exploration for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Kuan-Ta Li , Ping-Chun Hsieh , Yu-Chih Huang

We study Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits (CMABs) for non-episodic sequential decision making problems where the context includes both textual and numerical information (e.g., recommendation systems, dynamic portfolio adjustments, offer…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Uljad Berdica , Fernando Acero , Anton Ipsen , Parisa Zehtabi , Michael Cashmore , Manuela Veloso

In this paper, we study a non-stationary stochastic bandit problem, which generalizes the switching bandit problem. On top of the switching bandit problem (\textbf{Case a}), we are interested in three concrete examples: (\textbf{b}) the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-03 Anne Gael Manegueu , Alexandra Carpentier , Yi Yu

Mode estimation is a classical problem in statistics with a wide range of applications in machine learning. Despite this, there is little understanding in its robustness properties under possibly adversarial data contamination. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-09 Aldo Pacchiano , Heinrich Jiang , Michael I. Jordan

We consider the problem of fitting a reinforcement learning (RL) model to some given behavioral data under a multi-armed bandit environment. These models have received much attention in recent years for characterizing human and animal…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Hao Zhu , Jasper Hoffmann , Baohe Zhang , Joschka Boedecker

Sequential decision making for lifetime maximization is a critical problem in many real-world applications, such as medical treatment and portfolio selection. In these applications, a "reneging" phenomenon, where participants may disengage…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-16 Ping-Chun Hsieh , Xi Liu , Anirban Bhattacharya , P. R. Kumar

Non-stationary multi-armed bandits enable agents to adapt to changing environments by incorporating mechanisms to detect and respond to shifts in reward distributions, making them well-suited for dynamic settings. However, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Shaoang Li , Jian Li

This work studies a generalized class of restless multi-armed bandits with hidden states and allow cumulative feedback, as opposed to the conventional instantaneous feedback. We call them lazy restless bandits (LRB) as the events of…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-01-30 Kesav Kaza , Rahul Meshram , Varun Mehta , S. N. Merchant

We consider a general multi-armed bandit problem with correlated (and simple contextual and restless) elements, as a relaxed control problem. By introducing an entropy regularisation, we obtain a smooth asymptotic approximation to the value…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-07 Samuel N. Cohen , Tanut Treetanthiploet

An extension of the traditional two-armed bandit problem is considered, in which the decision maker has access to some side information before deciding which arm to pull. At each time t, before making a selection, the decision maker is able…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2007-07-16 Chih-Chun Wang , Sanjeev R. Kulkarni , H. Vincent Poor

"The Price of Robustness" by Bertsimas and Sim represented a breakthrough in the development of a tractable robust counterpart of Linear Programming Problems. However, the central modeling assumption that the deviation band of each…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-10-24 Christina Büsing , Fabio D'Andreagiovanni

We unify two prominent lines of work on multi-armed bandits: bandits with knapsacks (BwK) and combinatorial semi-bandits. The former concerns limited "resources" consumed by the algorithm, e.g., limited supply in dynamic pricing. The latter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-22 Karthik Abinav Sankararaman , Aleksandrs Slivkins

We consider the inverse problem of multi-armed bandits (IMAB) that are widely used in neuroscience and psychology research for behavior modelling. We first show that the IMAB problem is not convex in general, but can be relaxed to a convex…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Hao Zhu , Joschka Boedecker

We consider the scheduling problem concerning N projects. Each project evolves as a multi-state Markov process. At each time instant, one project is scheduled to work, and some reward depending on the state of the chosen project is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-02-02 Kehao Wang

We introduce the model selection problem in pure exploration linear bandits, where the learner needs to adapt to the instance-dependent complexity measure of the smallest hypothesis class containing the true model. We design algorithms in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-18 Yinglun Zhu , Julian Katz-Samuels , Robert Nowak

The generalized linear bandit framework has attracted a lot of attention in recent years by extending the well-understood linear setting and allowing to model richer reward structures. It notably covers the logistic model, widely used when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Louis Faury , Marc Abeille , Clément Calauzènes , Olivier Fercoq