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We study incentivized exploration in multi-armed bandit (MAB) settings with infinitely many arms modeled as elements in continuous metric spaces. Unlike classical bandit models, we consider scenarios where the decision-maker (principal)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Sourav Chakraborty , Amit Kiran Rege , Claire Monteleoni , Lijun Chen

We study best arm identification in a variant of the multi-armed bandit problem where the learner has limited precision in arm selection. The learner can only sample arms via certain exploration bundles, which we refer to as boxes. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Kota Srinivas Reddy , P. N. Karthik , Nikhil Karamchandani , Jayakrishnan Nair

We propose the first fully-adaptive algorithm for pure exploration in linear bandits---the task to find the arm with the largest expected reward, which depends on an unknown parameter linearly. While existing methods partially or entirely…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-10-17 Liyuan Xu , Junya Honda , Masashi Sugiyama

The classic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem tackles the challenge of accruing maximum reward while making decisions under uncertainty. However, in applications, often the goal is to minimize cost subject to a constraint on the minimum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Ishank Juneja , Carlee Joe-Wong , Osman Yağan

We introduce a novel extension of the canonical multi-armed bandit problem that incorporates an additional strategic innovation: abstention. In this enhanced framework, the agent is not only tasked with selecting an arm at each time step,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Junwen Yang , Tianyuan Jin , Vincent Y. F. Tan

Motivated by modern applications, such as online advertisement and recommender systems, we study the top-$k$ extreme contextual bandits problem, where the total number of arms can be enormous, and the learner is allowed to select $k$ arms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-17 Rajat Sen , Alexander Rakhlin , Lexing Ying , Rahul Kidambi , Dean Foster , Daniel Hill , Inderjit Dhillon

The stochastic multi-armed bandit model is a simple abstraction that has proven useful in many different contexts in statistics and machine learning. Whereas the achievable limit in terms of regret minimization is now well known, our aim is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-11-15 Emilie Kaufmann , Olivier Cappé , Aurélien Garivier

In multi-armed bandits with network interference (MABNI), the action taken by one node can influence the rewards of others, creating complex interdependence. While existing research on MABNI largely concentrates on minimizing regret, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Zichen Wang , Haoyang Hong , Chuanhao Li , Haoxuan Li , Zhiheng Zhang , Huazheng Wang

We consider the thresholding bandit problem, whose goal is to find arms of mean rewards above a given threshold $\theta$, with a fixed budget of $T$ trials. We introduce LSA, a new, simple and anytime algorithm that aims to minimize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Chao Tao , Saùl Blanco , Jian Peng , Yuan Zhou

We consider a variant of the traditional multi-armed bandit problem in which each arm is only able to provide one-bit feedback during each pull based on its past history of rewards. Our main result is the following: given an upper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-08 Daniel Vial , Sanjay Shakkottai , R. Srikant

We study adaptive regret bounds in terms of the variation of the losses (the so-called path-length bounds) for both multi-armed bandit and more generally linear bandit. We first show that the seemingly suboptimal path-length bound of (Wei…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-19 Sébastien Bubeck , Yuanzhi Li , Haipeng Luo , Chen-Yu Wei

We propose a novel algorithm for multi-player multi-armed bandits without collision sensing information. Our algorithm circumvents two problems shared by all state-of-the-art algorithms: it does not need as an input a lower bound on the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-07 Wei Huang , Richard Combes , Cindy Trinh

In multi-armed bandits, the most-explored arms are the most informative, while reward maximization typically pulls only the best arm. We study the tradeoff between identifying arm means accurately and accumulating reward, and present an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Akram Erraqabi , Alessandro Lazaric , Michal Valko , Emma Brunskill , Yun-En Liu

Autoregressive processes naturally arise in a large variety of real-world scenarios, including stock markets, sales forecasting, weather prediction, advertising, and pricing. When facing a sequential decision-making problem in such a…

We consider a contextual version of multi-armed bandit problem with global knapsack constraints. In each round, the outcome of pulling an arm is a scalar reward and a resource consumption vector, both dependent on the context, and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-07-12 Shipra Agrawal , Nikhil R. Devanur , Lihong Li

Mode estimation is a classical problem in statistics with a wide range of applications in machine learning. Despite this, there is little understanding in its robustness properties under possibly adversarial data contamination. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-09 Aldo Pacchiano , Heinrich Jiang , Michael I. Jordan

In this paper we consider the problem of learning the optimal policy for uncontrolled restless bandit problems. In an uncontrolled restless bandit problem, there is a finite set of arms, each of which when pulled yields a positive reward.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-01-30 Cem Tekin , Mingyan Liu

We consider the combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) problem, where the reward function is nonlinear. In this setting, the agent chooses a batch of arms on each round and receives feedback from each arm of the batch. The reward that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Nadav Merlis , Shie Mannor

We investigate the adversarial bandit problem with multiple plays under semi-bandit feedback. We introduce a highly efficient algorithm that asymptotically achieves the performance of the best switching $m$-arm strategy with minimax optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-02 N. Mert Vural , Hakan Gokcesu , Kaan Gokcesu , Suleyman S. Kozat

Stochastic Rank-One Bandits (Katarya et al, (2017a,b)) are a simple framework for regret minimization problems over rank-one matrices of arms. The initially proposed algorithms are proved to have logarithmic regret, but do not match the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-09 Cindy Trinh , Emilie Kaufmann , Claire Vernade , Richard Combes