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Related papers: Bandits with an Edge

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We study a constrained version of the knapsack problem in which dependencies between items are given by the adjacencies of a graph. In the 1-neighbour knapsack problem, an item can be selected only if at least one of its neighbours is also…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2011-09-28 Glencora Borradaile , Brent Heeringa , Gordon Wilfong

We introduce the probably approximately correct (PAC) \emph{Battling-Bandit} problem with the Plackett-Luce (PL) subset choice model--an online learning framework where at each trial the learner chooses a subset of $k$ arms from a fixed set…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-05 Aadirupa Saha , Aditya Gopalan

Bandit is a framework for designing sequential experiments. In each experiment, a learner selects an arm $A \in \mathcal{A}$ and obtains an observation corresponding to $A$. Theoretically, the tight regret lower-bound for the general bandit…

This paper studies the problem of identifying any $k$ distinct arms among the top $\rho$ fraction (e.g., top 5\%) of arms from a finite or infinite set with a probably approximately correct (PAC) tolerance $\epsilon$. We consider two cases:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Wenbo Ren , Jia Liu , Ness Shroff

We study bandit best-arm identification with arbitrary and potentially adversarial rewards. A simple random uniform learner obtains the optimal rate of error in the adversarial scenario. However, this type of strategy is suboptimal when the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-17 Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Peter L. Bartlett , Victor Gabillon , Alan Malek , Michal Valko

Bandit algorithms are guaranteed to solve diverse sequential decision-making problems, provided that a sufficient exploration budget is available. However, learning from scratch is often too costly for personalization tasks where a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Newton Mwai , Emil Carlsson , Fredrik D. Johansson

We introduce a new model of stochastic bandits with adversarial corruptions which aims to capture settings where most of the input follows a stochastic pattern but some fraction of it can be adversarially changed to trick the algorithm,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-28 Thodoris Lykouris , Vahab Mirrokni , Renato Paes Leme

In this paper we adapt the nearest neighbour rule to the contextual bandit problem. Our algorithm handles the fully adversarial setting in which no assumptions at all are made about the data-generation process. When combined with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-11 Stephen Pasteris , Chris Hicks , Vasilios Mavroudis

We study the best-arm identification problem in linear bandit, where the rewards of the arms depend linearly on an unknown parameter $\theta^*$ and the objective is to return the arm with the largest reward. We characterize the complexity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-11-05 Marta Soare , Alessandro Lazaric , Rémi Munos

Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-07 Branislav Kveton , Martin Mladenov , Chih-Wei Hsu , Manzil Zaheer , Csaba Szepesvari , Craig Boutilier

Identifying shortest paths between nodes in a network is a common graph analysis problem that is important for many applications involving routing of resources. An adversary that can manipulate the graph structure could alter traffic…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Benjamin A. Miller , Zohair Shafi , Wheeler Ruml , Yevgeniy Vorobeychik , Tina Eliassi-Rad , Scott Alfeld

Finding paths in graphs is a fundamental graph-theoretic task. In this work, we we are concerned with finding a path with some constraints on its length and the number of vertices neighboring the path, that is, being outside of and incident…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Max-Jonathan Luckow , Till Fluschnik

We study contextual bandits in the stochastic i.i.d.\ setting, where a learner observes contexts drawn from an unknown distribution, selects actions from a finite set $A$, and aims to identify an approximately optimal policy from a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Liad Erez , Fan Chen , Alon Cohen , Tomer Koren , Yishay Mansour , Shay Moran , Alexander Rakhlin

Finding the node with the largest label in a network, modeled as an undirected connected graph, is one of the fundamental problems in distributed computing. This is the way in which $\textit{leader election}$ is usually solved. We consider…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2014-11-06 Avery Miller , Andrzej Pelc

We study the problem of pure exploration in matching markets under uncertain preferences, where the goal is to identify a stable matching with confidence parameter $\delta$ and minimal sample complexity. Agents learn preferences via…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Tejas Pagare , Agniv Bandyopadhyay , Sandeep Juneja

Most recommender systems recommend a list of items. The user examines the list, from the first item to the last, and often chooses the first attractive item and does not examine the rest. This type of user behavior can be modeled by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-07-01 Shi Zong , Hao Ni , Kenny Sung , Nan Rosemary Ke , Zheng Wen , Branislav Kveton

The celebrated Monte Carlo method estimates an expensive-to-compute quantity by random sampling. Bandit-based Monte Carlo optimization is a general technique for computing the minimum of many such expensive-to-compute quantities by adaptive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-30 Vivek Bagaria , Tavor Z. Baharav , Govinda M. Kamath , David N. Tse

Learning paradigms based purely on offline data as well as those based solely on sequential online learning have been well-studied in the literature. In this paper, we consider combining offline data with online learning, an area less…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Shubhada Agrawal , Sandeep Juneja , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Arun Sai Suggala

In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, d arms are available to the decision maker who pulls them sequentially in order to maximize his cumulative reward. Guarantees can be obtained on a relative quantity called regret, which scales…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-06 Joon Kwon , Vianney Perchet , Claire Vernade

The improving multi-armed bandits problem is a formal model for allocating effort under uncertainty, motivated by scenarios such as investing research effort into new technologies, performing clinical trials, and hyperparameter selection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Avrim Blum , Marten Garicano , Kavya Ravichandran , Dravyansh Sharma