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We obtain essentially tight upper bounds for a strengthened notion of regret in the stochastic linear bandits framework. The strengthening -- referred to as Nash regret -- is defined as the difference between the (a priori unknown) optimum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Ayush Sawarni , Soumybrata Pal , Siddharth Barman

Bayesian bandit algorithms with approximate Bayesian inference have been widely used in real-world applications. Despite the superior practical performance, their theoretical justification is less investigated in the literature, especially…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-23 Ziyi Huang , Henry Lam , Haofeng Zhang

Thompson sampling is one of the most widely used algorithms for many online decision problems, due to its simplicity in implementation and superior empirical performance over other state-of-the-art methods. Despite its popularity and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-02 Tianyuan Jin , Pan Xu , Jieming Shi , Xiaokui Xiao , Quanquan Gu

In this paper, we study the problem of stochastic linear bandits with finite action sets. Most of existing work assume the payoffs are bounded or sub-Gaussian, which may be violated in some scenarios such as financial markets. To settle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-29 Bo Xue , Guanghui Wang , Yimu Wang , Lijun Zhang

Fast changing states or volatile environments pose a significant challenge to online optimization, which needs to perform rapid adaptation under limited observation. In this paper, we give query and regret optimal bandit algorithms under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Zhou Lu , Qiuyi Zhang , Xinyi Chen , Fred Zhang , David Woodruff , Elad Hazan

We consider stochastic sequential learning problems where the learner can observe the \textit{average reward of several actions}. Such a setting is interesting in many applications involving monitoring and surveillance, where the set of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-06-22 Manjesh Kumar Hanawal , Venkatesh Saligrama , Michal Valko , R\' emi Munos

Optimal regret bounds for Multi-Armed Bandit problems are now well documented. They can be classified into two categories based on the growth rate with respect to the time horizon $T$: (i) small, distribution-dependent, bounds of order of…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-04-12 Arthur Flajolet , Patrick Jaillet

In this work, we extend the concept of the $p$-mean welfare objective from social choice theory (Moulin 2004) to study $p$-mean regret in stochastic multi-armed bandit problems. The $p$-mean regret, defined as the difference between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Anand Krishna , Philips George John , Adarsh Barik , Vincent Y. F. Tan

Many works have developed no-regret algorithms for contextual bandits with function approximation, where the mean reward function over context-action pairs belongs to a function class. Although there are many approaches to this problem, one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Aldo Pacchiano

Thompson Sampling (TS) is one of the most effective algorithms for solving contextual multi-armed bandit problems. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, called Neural Thompson Sampling, which adapts deep neural networks for both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Weitong Zhang , Dongruo Zhou , Lihong Li , Quanquan Gu

We study the distribution of regret in stochastic multi-armed bandits and episodic reinforcement learning through a unified framework. We formalize a distributional regret bound as a probabilistic guarantee that holds uniformly over all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Harin Lee , Min-hwan Oh

Much of the recent literature on bandit learning focuses on algorithms that aim to converge on an optimal action. One shortcoming is that this orientation does not account for time sensitivity, which can play a crucial role when learning an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-09 Daniel Russo , Benjamin Van Roy

We study the stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem under worst-case regret and heavy-tailed reward distribution. We modify the minimax policy MOSS for the sub-Gaussian reward distribution by using saturated empirical mean to design a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-19 Lai Wei , Vaibhav Srivastava

Motivated by dynamic parameter optimization in finite, but large action (configurations) spaces, this work studies the nonstochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem in metric action spaces with oblivious Lipschitz adversaries. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Chen Avin , Zvi Lotker , Shie Mannor , Gil Shabat , Hanan Shteingart , Roey Yadgar

We study a generalization of the multi-armed bandit problem with multiple plays where there is a cost associated with pulling each arm and the agent has a budget at each time that dictates how much she can expect to spend. We derive an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-13 Alexander Luedtke , Emilie Kaufmann , Antoine Chambaz

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

We consider a continuous-time multi-arm bandit problem (CTMAB), where the learner can sample arms any number of times in a given interval and obtain a random reward from each sample, however, increasing the frequency of sampling incurs an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Rahul Vaze , Manjesh K. Hanawal

Efficiently trading off exploration and exploitation is one of the key challenges in online Reinforcement Learning (RL). Most works achieve this by carefully estimating the model uncertainty and following the so-called optimistic model.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Asaf Cassel , Orin Levy , Yishay Mansour

We study the $\textit{single-index bandit}$ problem, where rewards depend on an unknown one-dimensional projection of high-dimensional contexts through an unknown reward function. This model extends linear and generalized linear bandits to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-12 Devdan Dey , Sujoy Bhore , Avishek Ghosh

Motivated by a natural problem in online model selection with bandit information, we introduce and analyze a best arm identification problem in the rested bandit setting, wherein arm expected losses decrease with the number of times the arm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-08 Leonardo Cella , Claudio Gentile , Massimiliano Pontil