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Contextual bandits are incredibly useful in many practical problems. We go one step further by devising a more realistic problem that combines: (1) contextual bandits with dense arm features, (2) non-linear reward functions, and (3) a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Wei Min Loh , Sajib Kumer Sinha , Ankur Agarwal , Pascal Poupart

In bandit settings, optimizing long-term regret metrics requires exploration, which corresponds to sometimes taking myopically sub-optimal actions. When a long-lived principal merely recommends actions to be executed by a sequence of…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Ramya Ramalingam , Osbert Bastani , Aaron Roth

Bayesian optimization is a framework for global search via maximum a posteriori updates rather than simulated annealing, and has gained prominence for decision-making under uncertainty. In this work, we cast Bayesian optimization as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-24 Amrit Singh Bedi , Dheeraj Peddireddy , Vaneet Aggarwal , Brian M. Sadler , Alec Koppel

Despite the great interest in the bandit problem, designing efficient algorithms for complex models remains challenging, as there is typically no analytical way to quantify uncertainty. In this paper, we propose Multiplier Bootstrap-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Runzhe Wan , Haoyu Wei , Branislav Kveton , Rui Song

We study a nonparametric contextual bandit problem where the expected reward functions belong to a H\"older class with smoothness parameter $\beta$. We show how this interpolates between two extremes that were previously studied in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-14 Yichun Hu , Nathan Kallus , Xiaojie Mao

We study an important variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, which takes penalization into consideration. Instead of directly maximizing cumulative expected reward, we need to balance between the total reward and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-16 Guanhua Fang , Ping Li , Gennady Samorodnitsky

Contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms have been shown promising for maximizing cumulative rewards in sequential decision tasks such as news article recommendation systems, web page ad placement algorithms, and mobile health.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-01 Gi-Soo Kim , Myunghee Cho Paik

In this paper we propose a general methodology to derive regret bounds for randomized multi-armed bandit algorithms. It consists in checking a set of sufficient conditions on the sampling probability of each arm and on the family of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-14 Dorian Baudry , Kazuya Suzuki , Junya Honda

We introduce Conformal Bandits, a novel framework integrating Conformal Prediction (CP) into bandit problems, a classic paradigm for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. Traditional regret-minimisation bandit strategies like…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Simone Cuonzo , Nina Deliu

In this paper, we consider the Gaussian process (GP) bandit optimization problem in a non-stationary environment. To capture external changes, the black-box function is allowed to be time-varying within a reproducing kernel Hilbert space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Yuntian Deng , Xingyu Zhou , Baekjin Kim , Ambuj Tewari , Abhishek Gupta , Ness Shroff

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

The stochastic multi-armed bandit setting has been recently studied in the non-stationary regime, where the mean payoff of each action is a non-decreasing function of the number of rounds passed since it was last played. This model captures…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Orestis Papadigenopoulos , Constantine Caramanis , Sanjay Shakkottai

We study the benefits of sparsity in nonparametric contextual bandit problems, in which the set of candidate features is countably or uncountably infinite. Our contribution is two-fold. First, using a novel reduction to sequences of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-16 Hamish Flynn , Julia Olkhovskaya , Paul Rognon-Vael

Stochastic rising rested bandit (SRRB) is a setting where the arms' expected rewards increase as they are pulled. It models scenarios in which the performances of the different options grow as an effect of an underlying learning process…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-21 Marco Fiandri , Alberto Maria Metelli , Francesco Trovò

Motivated by the fact that humans like some level of unpredictability or novelty, and might therefore get quickly bored when interacting with a stationary policy, we introduce a novel non-stationary bandit problem, where the expected reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Pierre Laforgue , Giulia Clerici , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Ran Gilad-Bachrach

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

Generalized Linear Bandits (GLBs) are powerful extensions to the Linear Bandit (LB) setting, broadening the benefits of reward parametrization beyond linearity. In this paper we study GLBs in non-stationary environments, characterized by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-11 Louis Faury , Yoan Russac , Marc Abeille , Clément Calauzènes

We analyze the $K$-armed bandit problem where the reward for each arm is a noisy realization based on an observed context under mild nonparametric assumptions. We attain tight results for top-arm identification and a sublinear regret of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-08 Melody Y. Guan , Heinrich Jiang

Regret in stochastic multi-armed bandits traditionally measures the difference between the highest reward and either the arithmetic mean of accumulated rewards or the final reward. These conventional metrics often fail to address fairness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Dhruv Sarkar , Nishant Pandey , Sayak Ray Chowdhury

The multi-armed bandit(MAB) is a classical sequential decision problem. Most work requires assumptions about the reward distribution (e.g., bounded), while practitioners may have difficulty obtaining information about these distributions to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Han Qi , Fei Guo , Li Zhu