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We study the regret of reinforcement learning from offline data generated by a fixed behavior policy in an infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision process (MDP). While existing analyses of common approaches, such as fitted $Q$-iteration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Yichun Hu , Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

LLM inference often generates a batch of candidates for a prompt and selects one via strategies like majority voting or Best-of- N (BoN). For difficult tasks, this single-shot selection often underperforms. Consequently, evaluations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Qiwei Di , Kaixuan Ji , Xuheng Li , Heyang Zhao , Quanquan Gu

We consider the classic problem of online convex optimisation. Whereas the notion of static regret is relevant for stationary problems, the notion of switching regret is more appropriate for non-stationary problems. A switching regret is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Stephen Pasteris , Chris Hicks , Vasilios Mavroudis , Mark Herbster

We consider the problem of using observational bandit feedback data from multiple heterogeneous data sources to learn a personalized decision policy that robustly generalizes across diverse target settings. To achieve this, we propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Aldo Gael Carranza , Susan Athey

The standard theory of optimal stopping is based on the idealised assumption that the underlying process is essentially known. In this paper, we drop this restriction and study data-driven optimal stopping for a general diffusion process,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-12-12 Sören Christensen , Niklas Dexheimer , Claudia Strauch

We design and implement an adaptive experiment (a ``contextual bandit'') to learn a targeted treatment assignment policy, where the goal is to use a participant's survey responses to determine which charity to expose them to in a donation…

We consider the problem of online nonparametric regression with arbitrary deterministic sequences. Using ideas from the chaining technique, we design an algorithm that achieves a Dudley-type regret bound similar to the one obtained in a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-07-02 Pierre Gaillard , Sébastien Gerchinovitz

We uncover a fairly general principle in online learning: If regret can be (approximately) expressed as a function of certain "sufficient statistics" for the data sequence, then there exists a special Burkholder function that 1) can be used…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-22 Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin , Karthik Sridharan

We consider prediction with expert advice for strongly convex and bounded losses, and investigate trade-offs between regret and "variance" (i.e., squared difference of learner's predictions and best expert predictions). With $K$ experts,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Dirk van der Hoeven , Nikita Zhivotovskiy , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

We study a stochastic budget-allocation problem over $K$ tasks. At each round $t$, the learner chooses an allocation $X_t \in \Delta_K$. Task $k$ succeeds with probability $F_k(X_{t,k})$, where $F_1,\dots,F_K$ are nondecreasing…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-05 François Bachoc , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Tommaso Cesari , Roberto Colomboni

We study non-rectangular robust Markov decision processes under the average-reward criterion, where the ambiguity set couples transition probabilities across states and the adversary commits to a stationary kernel for the entire horizon. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-11 Shengbo Wang , Nian Si

We consider contextual bandit learning under distribution shift when reward vectors are ordered according to a given preference cone. We propose an adaptive-discretization and optimistic elimination based policy that self-tunes to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Apurv Shukla , P. R. Kumar

We introduce algorithms for online, full-information prediction that are competitive with contextual tree experts of unknown complexity, in both probabilistic and adversarial settings. We show that by incorporating a probabilistic framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-23 Vidya Muthukumar , Mitas Ray , Anant Sahai , Peter L. Bartlett

We study online linear regression problems in a distributed setting, where the data is spread over a network. In each round, each network node proposes a linear predictor, with the objective of fitting the \emph{network-wide} data. It then…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-14 Deming Yuan , Alexandre Proutiere , Guodong Shi

We consider the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with a prior distribution on the reward distributions. We are interested in studying prior-free and prior-dependent regret bounds, very much in the same spirit as the usual…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-10-04 Sébastien Bubeck , Che-Yu Liu

An abundance of recent impossibility results establish that regret minimization in Markov games with adversarial opponents is both statistically and computationally intractable. Nevertheless, none of these results preclude the possibility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Liad Erez , Tal Lancewicki , Uri Sherman , Tomer Koren , Yishay Mansour

We investigate the problem of online collaborative filtering under no-repetition constraints, whereby users need to be served content in an online fashion and a given user cannot be recommended the same content item more than once. We start…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Stephen Pasteris , Fabio Vitale , Mark Herbster , Claudio Gentile , Andre' Panisson

We study the i.i.d. $k$-selection prophet inequality problem, where a decision-maker sequentially observes $n$ independent nonnegative rewards and may accept at most $k$ of them without knowledge of future realizations. The objective is to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-24 Jieming Kong , Karthyek Murthy

We consider online resource allocation problems where given a set of requests our goal is to select a subset that maximizes a value minus cost type of objective function. Requests are presented online in random order, and each request…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2011-12-07 Siddharth Barman , Seeun Umboh , Shuchi Chawla , David Malec

We consider an online model for recommendation systems, with each user being recommended an item at each time-step and providing 'like' or 'dislike' feedback. Each user may be recommended a given item at most once. A latent variable model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-08 Guy Bresler , Mina Karzand