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One of the key drivers of complexity in the classical (stochastic) multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is the difference between mean rewards in the top two arms, also known as the instance gap. The celebrated Upper Confidence Bound (UCB)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Anand Kalvit , Assaf Zeevi

This work addresses the problem of regret minimization in non-stochastic multi-armed bandit problems, focusing on performance guarantees that hold with high probability. Such results are rather scarce in the literature since proving them…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-11-04 Gergely Neu

We study an interesting variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, called the Fair-SMAB problem, where each arm is required to be pulled for at least a given fraction of the total available rounds. We investigate the interplay…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-06 Vishakha Patil , Ganesh Ghalme , Vineet Nair , Y. Narahari

In multi-armed bandit problems, the typical goal is to identify the arm with the highest reward. This paper explores a threshold-based bandit problem, aiming to select an arm based on its relation to a prescribed threshold \(\tau \). We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Chanakya Varude , Jay Chaudhary , Siddharth Kaushik , Prasanna Chaporkar

Motivated by modern applications, such as online advertisement and recommender systems, we study the top-$k$ extreme contextual bandits problem, where the total number of arms can be enormous, and the learner is allowed to select $k$ arms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-17 Rajat Sen , Alexander Rakhlin , Lexing Ying , Rahul Kidambi , Dean Foster , Daniel Hill , Inderjit Dhillon

We study a regret minimization problem with the existence of multiple best/near-optimal arms in the multi-armed bandit setting. We consider the case when the number of arms/actions is comparable or much larger than the time horizon, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-23 Yinglun Zhu , Robert Nowak

We study a novel multi-armed bandit problem that models the challenge faced by a company wishing to explore new strategies to maximize revenue whilst simultaneously maintaining their revenue above a fixed baseline, uniformly over time.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-02-16 Yifan Wu , Roshan Shariff , Tor Lattimore , Csaba Szepesvári

I analyse the frequentist regret of the famous Gittins index strategy for multi-armed bandits with Gaussian noise and a finite horizon. Remarkably it turns out that this approach leads to finite-time regret guarantees comparable to those…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-31 Tor Lattimore

We consider the stochastic linear (multi-armed) contextual bandit problem with the possibility of hidden simple multi-armed bandit structure in which the rewards are independent of the contextual information. Algorithms that are designed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-07 Niladri S. Chatterji , Vidya Muthukumar , Peter L. Bartlett

We study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in the $P$-pass streaming model. In this problem, the $n$ arms are present in a stream and at most $m<n$ arms and their statistics can be stored in the memory. We give a complete…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Yuchen He , Zichun Ye , Chihao Zhang

We study the problem of corralling stochastic bandit algorithms, that is combining multiple bandit algorithms designed for a stochastic environment, with the goal of devising a corralling algorithm that performs almost as well as the best…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Raman Arora , Teodor V. Marinov , Mehryar Mohri

The purpose of this paper is to provide further understanding into the structure of the sequential allocation ("stochastic multi-armed bandit", or MAB) problem by establishing probability one finite horizon bounds and convergence rates for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-12-18 Wesley Cowan , Michael N. Katehakis

We address a generalization of the bandit with knapsacks problem, where a learner aims to maximize rewards while satisfying an arbitrary set of long-term constraints. Our goal is to design best-of-both-worlds algorithms that perform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Martino Bernasconi , Matteo Castiglioni , Andrea Celli , Federico Fusco

We consider the restless Markov bandit problem, in which the state of each arm evolves according to a Markov process independently of the learner's actions. We suggest an algorithm that after $T$ steps achieves $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-10-23 Ronald Ortner , Daniil Ryabko , Peter Auer , Rémi Munos

We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting and study the problem of constrained regret minimization over a given time horizon. Each arm is associated with an unknown, possibly multi-dimensional distribution, and the merit of an arm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Anmol Kagrecha , Jayakrishnan Nair , Krishna Jagannathan

We study a variant of the stochastic $K$-armed bandit problem, which we call "bandits with delayed, aggregated anonymous feedback". In this problem, when the player pulls an arm, a reward is generated, however it is not immediately…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-14 Ciara Pike-Burke , Shipra Agrawal , Csaba Szepesvari , Steffen Grunewalder

The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a classical learning task that exemplifies the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. However, standard formulations do not take into account {\em risk}. In online decision making systems, risk is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Qiuyu Zhu , Vincent Y. F. Tan

Motivated by applications in online bidding and sleeping bandits, we examine the problem of contextual bandits with cross learning, where the learner observes the loss associated with the action across all possible contexts, not just the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Ruiyuan Huang , Zengfeng Huang

This paper studies bandit problems where an agent has access to offline data that might be utilized to potentially improve the estimation of each arm's reward distribution. A major obstacle in this setting is the existence of compound…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-21 Wen Huang , Xintao Wu

Learning good interventions in a causal graph can be modelled as a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with side-information. First, we study this problem when interventions are more expensive than observations and a budget is specified.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-15 Vineet Nair , Vishakha Patil , Gaurav Sinha