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Thompson sampling is one of the earliest randomized algorithms for multi-armed bandits (MAB). In this paper, we extend the Thompson sampling to Budgeted MAB, where there is random cost for pulling an arm and the total cost is constrained by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-05-04 Yingce Xia , Haifang Li , Tao Qin , Nenghai Yu , Tie-Yan Liu

We consider the problem of contextual bandits where actions are subsets of a ground set and mean rewards are modeled by an unknown monotone submodular function that belongs to a class $\mathcal{F}$. We allow time-varying matroid constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Dean P. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin

Thompson sampling, a Bayesian method for balancing exploration and exploitation in bandit problems, has theoretical guarantees and exhibits strong empirical performance in many domains. Traditional Thompson sampling, however, assumes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-04 Andrew Stirn , Tony Jebara

In this paper we propose a novel experimental design-based algorithm to minimize regret in online stochastic linear and combinatorial bandits. While existing literature tends to focus on optimism-based algorithms--which have been shown to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Andrew Wagenmaker , Julian Katz-Samuels , Kevin Jamieson

We revisit the classic regret-minimization problem in the stochastic multi-armed bandit setting when the arm-distributions are allowed to be heavy-tailed. Regret minimization has been well studied in simpler settings of either bounded…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Shubhada Agrawal , Sandeep Juneja , Wouter M. Koolen

Bayesian bandit algorithms with approximate Bayesian inference have been widely used in real-world applications. However, there is a large discrepancy between the superior practical performance of these approaches and their theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-13 Ziyi Huang , Henry Lam , Amirhossein Meisami , Haofeng Zhang

We address the problem of regret minimization in logistic contextual bandits, where a learner decides among sequential actions or arms given their respective contexts to maximize binary rewards. Using a fast inference procedure with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-22 Bianca Dumitrascu , Karen Feng , Barbara E Engelhardt

Contextual bandits are a central framework for sequential decision-making, with applications ranging from recommendation systems to clinical trials. While nonparametric methods can flexibly model complex reward structures, they suffer from…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-01 Wanteng Ma , T. Tony Cai

The literature on bandit learning and regret analysis has focused on contexts where the goal is to converge on an optimal action in a manner that limits exploration costs. One shortcoming imposed by this orientation is that it does not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-01 Daniel Russo , David Tse , Benjamin Van Roy

The adversarial Bandit with Knapsack problem is a multi-armed bandits problem with budget constraints and adversarial rewards and costs. In each round, a learner selects an action to take and observes the reward and cost of the selected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Mark Braverman , Jingyi Liu , Jieming Mao , Jon Schneider , Eric Xue

We propose a new bootstrap-based online algorithm for stochastic linear bandit problems. The key idea is to adopt residual bootstrap exploration, in which the agent estimates the next step reward by re-sampling the residuals of mean reward…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-20 Shuang Wu , Chi-Hua Wang , Yuantong Li , Guang Cheng

Reward-biased maximum likelihood estimation (RBMLE) is a classic principle in the adaptive control literature for tackling explore-exploit trade-offs. This paper studies the stochastic contextual bandit problem with general bounded reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Yu-Heng Hung , Ping-Chun Hsieh

We consider Bandits with Knapsacks (henceforth, BwK), a general model for multi-armed bandits under supply/budget constraints. In particular, a bandit algorithm needs to solve a well-known knapsack problem: find an optimal packing of items…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Nicole Immorlica , Karthik Abinav Sankararaman , Robert Schapire , Aleksandrs Slivkins

This paper studies bandit convex optimization in non-stationary environments with two-point feedback, using dynamic regret as the performance measure. We propose an algorithm based on bandit mirror descent that extends naturally to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-26 Chang He , Bo Jiang , Shuzhong Zhang

In this paper we consider Thompson Sampling (TS) for combinatorial semi-bandits. We demonstrate that, perhaps surprisingly, TS is sub-optimal for this problem in the sense that its regret scales exponentially in the ambient dimension, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-22 Raymond Zhang , Richard Combes

In recommender system or crowdsourcing applications of online learning, a human's preferences or abilities are often a function of the algorithm's recent actions. Motivated by this, a significant line of work has formalized settings where…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-05 Dhruv Malik , Conor Igoe , Yuanzhi Li , Aarti Singh

We study the stochastic contextual bandit problem, where the reward is generated from an unknown function with additive noise. No assumption is made about the reward function other than boundedness. We propose a new algorithm, NeuralUCB,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-03 Dongruo Zhou , Lihong Li , Quanquan Gu

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

This paper introduces and addresses a wide class of stochastic bandit problems where the function mapping the arm to the corresponding reward exhibits some known structural properties. Most existing structures (e.g. linear, Lipschitz,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-02 Richard Combes , Stefan Magureanu , Alexandre Proutiere

We study reward maximisation in a wide class of structured stochastic multi-armed bandit problems, where the mean rewards of arms satisfy some given structural constraints, e.g. linear, unimodal, sparse, etc. Our aim is to develop methods…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-03 Rémy Degenne , Han Shao , Wouter M. Koolen