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We study the tail behavior of regret in stochastic multi-armed bandits for algorithms that are asymptotically optimal in expectation. While minimizing expected regret is the classical objective, recent work shows that even such algorithms…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Subhodip Panda , Shubhada Agrawal

We consider the problem where M agents collaboratively interact with an instance of a stochastic K-armed contextual bandit, where K>>M. The goal of the agents is to simultaneously minimize the cumulative regret over all the agents over a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-16 Jiabin Lin , Shana Moothedath

We study a finite-horizon restless multi-armed bandit problem with multiple actions, dubbed R(MA)^2B. The state of each arm evolves according to a controlled Markov decision process (MDP), and the reward of pulling an arm depends on both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-25 Guojun Xiong , Jian Li , Rahul Singh

We consider a novel multi-armed bandit framework where the rewards obtained by pulling the arms are functions of a common latent random variable. The correlation between arms due to the common random source can be used to design a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-31 Samarth Gupta , Gauri Joshi , Osman Yağan

Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization is widely used in offline decision-making and offers several benefits, motivating recent work on the sample complexity of offline learning with respect to KL-regularized performance metrics.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Kaixuan Ji , Qiwei Di , Heyang Zhao , Qingyue Zhao , Quanquan Gu

In this paper we consider the problem of best-arm identification in multi-armed bandits in the fixed confidence setting, where the goal is to identify, with probability $1-\delta$ for some $\delta>0$, the arm with the highest mean reward in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-09-13 Samarth Gupta , Gauri Joshi , Osman Yağan

We consider a stochastic bandit problem with a possibly infinite number of arms. We write $p^*$ for the proportion of optimal arms and $\Delta$ for the minimal mean-gap between optimal and sub-optimal arms. We characterize the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-08 Rianne de Heide , James Cheshire , Pierre Ménard , Alexandra Carpentier

Stochastic multi-armed bandits (MABs) provide a fundamental reinforcement learning model to study sequential decision making in uncertain environments. The upper confidence bounds (UCB) algorithm gave birth to the renaissance of bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Ambrus Tamás , Szabolcs Szentpéteri , Balázs Csanád Csáji

Strategic behavior against sequential learning methods, such as "click framing" in real recommendation systems, have been widely observed. Motivated by such behavior we study the problem of combinatorial multi-armed bandits (CMAB) under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-22 Jing Dong , Ke Li , Shuai Li , Baoxiang Wang

Sequential decision-making under uncertainty often involves multiple agents learning which actions (arms) yield the highest rewards through repeated interaction with a stochastic environment. This setting is commonly modeled by cooperative…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-25 Evagoras Makridis , Themistoklis Charalambous

I present the first algorithm for stochastic finite-armed bandits that simultaneously enjoys order-optimal problem-dependent regret and worst-case regret. Besides the theoretical results, the new algorithm is simple, efficient and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-02-25 Tor Lattimore

We consider model-based reinforcement learning in finite Markov De- cision Processes (MDPs), focussing on so-called optimistic strategies. In MDPs, optimism can be implemented by carrying out extended value it- erations under a constraint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-09-22 Sarah Filippi , Olivier Cappé , Aurélien Garivier

We consider the problem of \textit{best arm identification} with a \textit{fixed budget $T$}, in the $K$-armed stochastic bandit setting, with arms distribution defined on $[0,1]$. We prove that any bandit strategy, for at least one bandit…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-05-31 Alexandra Carpentier , Andrea Locatelli

We consider the setup of stochastic multi-armed bandits in the case when reward distributions are piecewise i.i.d. and bounded with unknown changepoints. We focus on the case when changes happen simultaneously on all arms, and in stark…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard

We obtain the upper bound of the loss function for a strategy in the multi-armed bandit problem with Gaussian distributions of incomes. Considered strategy is an asymptotic generalization of the strategy proposed by J. Bather for the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-02-04 Alexander Kolnogorov , Sergey Garbar

Estimating the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between two distributions given samples from them is well-studied in machine learning and information theory. Motivated by considerations of multi-group fairness, we seek KL divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Parikshit Gopalan , Nina Narodytska , Omer Reingold , Vatsal Sharan , Udi Wieder

We consider stochastic multi-armed bandit problems where the expected reward is a Lipschitz function of the arm, and where the set of arms is either discrete or continuous. For discrete Lipschitz bandits, we derive asymptotic problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-05-20 Stefan Magureanu , Richard Combes , Alexandre Proutiere

We present conservative distributed multi-task learning in stochastic linear contextual bandits with heterogeneous agents. This extends conservative linear bandits to a distributed setting where M agents tackle different but related tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Jiabin Lin , Shana Moothedath

In this paper we investigate the problem of stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB) in the (local) differential privacy (DP/LDP) model. Unlike previous results that assume bounded/sub-Gaussian reward distributions, we focus on the setting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-25 Youming Tao , Yulian Wu , Peng Zhao , Di Wang

We consider a contextual bandit problem with a combinatorial action set and time-varying base arm availability. At the beginning of each round, the agent observes the set of available base arms and their contexts and then selects an action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Andi Nika , Sepehr Elahi , Cem Tekin