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Most bandit algorithm designs are purely theoretical. Therefore, they have strong regret guarantees, but also are often too conservative in practice. In this work, we pioneer the idea of algorithm design by minimizing the empirical Bayes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-12 Chih-Wei Hsu , Branislav Kveton , Ofer Meshi , Martin Mladenov , Csaba Szepesvari

We analyze the minimax regret of the adversarial bandit convex optimization problem. Focusing on the one-dimensional case, we prove that the minimax regret is $\widetilde\Theta(\sqrt{T})$ and partially resolve a decade-old open problem. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-02-24 Sébastien Bubeck , Ofer Dekel , Tomer Koren , Yuval Peres

Bayesian optimization is highly effective for optimizing expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions, but it faces significant computational challenges due to the cubic per-iteration cost of Gaussian processes, which results in a total time…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-21 Tansheng Zhu , Hongyu Zhou , Ke Jin , Xusheng Xu , Qiufan Yuan , Lijie Ji

We consider the classical problems of estimating the mean of an $n$-dimensional normally (with identity covariance matrix) or Poisson distributed vector under the squared loss. In a Bayesian setting the optimal estimator is given by the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-09-13 Yury Polyanskiy , Yihong Wu

Stochastic linear bandits are a fundamental model for sequential decision making, where an agent selects a vector-valued action and receives a noisy reward with expected value given by an unknown linear function. Although well studied in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Bruce Huang , Ruida Zhou , Lin F. Yang , Suhas Diggavi

Time-Varying Bayesian Optimization (TVBO) is the go-to framework for optimizing a time-varying black-box objective function that may be noisy and expensive to evaluate, but its excellent empirical performance remains to be understood…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-21 Anthony Bardou , Patrick Thiran

We consider the problem of provably optimal exploration in reinforcement learning for finite horizon MDPs. We show that an optimistic modification to value iteration achieves a regret bound of $\tilde{O}( \sqrt{HSAT} + H^2S^2A+H\sqrt{T})$…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-04 Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar , Ian Osband , Rémi Munos

Unlike classical control theory, such as Linear Quadratic Control (LQC), real-world control problems are highly complex. These problems often involve adversarial perturbations, bandit feedback models, and non-quadratic, adversarially chosen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Y. Jennifer Sun , Zhou Lu

Finding optimal feedback controllers for nonlinear dynamic systems from data is hard. Recently, Bayesian optimization (BO) has been proposed as a powerful framework for direct controller tuning from experimental trials. For selecting the…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-02-07 Alonso Marco , Philipp Hennig , Stefan Schaal , Sebastian Trimpe

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a widely used framework for optimizing expensive black-box functions, commonly based on Gaussian process (GP) surrogate models. Its effectiveness relies on uncertainty quantification that is both sharp…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Marshal Arijona Sinaga , Julien Martinelli , Teemu Turpeinen , Samuel Kaski

A stochastic combinatorial semi-bandit is an online learning problem where at each step a learning agent chooses a subset of ground items subject to constraints, and then observes stochastic weights of these items and receives their sum as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-08 Branislav Kveton , Zheng Wen , Azin Ashkan , Csaba Szepesvari

In this paper, we study error bounds for {\em Bayesian quadrature} (BQ), with an emphasis on noisy settings, randomized algorithms, and average-case performance measures. We seek to approximate the integral of functions in a {\em…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-13 Xu Cai , Chi Thanh Lam , Jonathan Scarlett

We consider the problem of sequentially maximizing an unknown function $f$ over a set of actions of the form $(s,\mathbf{x})$, where the selected actions must satisfy a safety constraint with respect to an unknown safety function $g$. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-06 Arpan Losalka , Jonathan Scarlett

We study zeroth-order optimisation under context distributional uncertainty, a setting commonly tackled using Bayesian optimisation (BO). A prevailing strategy to make BO more robust to the complex and noisy nature of data is to employ an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Tigran Ramazyan , Denis Derkach

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is widely used for optimising black-box functions but requires us to specify the length scale hyperparameter, which defines the smoothness of the functions the optimizer will consider. Most current BO algorithms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-26 Juliusz Ziomek , Masaki Adachi , Michael A. Osborne

Optimization of product and system characteristics is required in many fields, including design and control. Bayesian optimization (BO) is often used when there are high observing costs, because BO theoretically guarantees an upper bound on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Yasunori Taguchi , Hiro Gangi

We study the Gaussian process (GP) bandit problem, whose goal is to minimize regret under an unknown reward function lying in some reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). The maximum posterior variance analysis is vital in analyzing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Shogo Iwazaki , Shion Takeno

A central problem in the theory of empirical Bayes is to control the regret (excess risk) of a learned Bayes rule by the Hellinger distance between the estimated and true marginal densities. In the normal means model, the classical result…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-05 Jiafeng Chen , Yihong Wu

This paper considers Bayesian optimization (BO) for problems with known outer problem structure. In contrast to the classic BO setting, where the objective function itself is unknown and needs to be iteratively estimated from noisy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-19 Katrin Baumgärtner , Moritz Diehl

We study the stochastic linear bandits with parameter noise model, in which the reward of action $a$ is $a^\top \theta$ where $\theta$ is sampled i.i.d. We show a regret upper bound of $\widetilde{O} (\sqrt{d T \log (K/\delta)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Daniel Ezer , Alon Peled-Cohen , Yishay Mansour