English
Related papers

Related papers: PAC Battling Bandits in the Plackett-Luce Model

200 papers

We consider a sequential subset selection problem under parameter uncertainty, where at each time step, the decision maker selects a subset of cardinality $K$ from $N$ possible items (arms), and observes a (bandit) feedback in the form of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-07 Shipra Agrawal , Vashist Avadhanula , Vineet Goyal , Assaf Zeevi

We study the problem of online learning in Stackelberg games with side information between a leader and a sequence of followers. In every round the leader observes contextual information and commits to a mixed strategy, after which the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Maria-Florina Balcan , Martino Bernasconi , Matteo Castiglioni , Andrea Celli , Keegan Harris , Zhiwei Steven Wu

We consider the problem of model selection for two popular stochastic linear bandit settings, and propose algorithms that adapts to the unknown problem complexity. In the first setting, we consider the $K$ armed mixture bandits, where the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-17 Avishek Ghosh , Abishek Sankararaman , Kannan Ramchandran

We introduce the problem of regret minimization in Adversarial Dueling Bandits. As in classic Dueling Bandits, the learner has to repeatedly choose a pair of items and observe only a relative binary `win-loss' feedback for this pair, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-29 Aadirupa Saha , Tomer Koren , Yishay Mansour

The dramatic improvements in core information retrieval tasks engendered by neural rankers create a need for novel evaluation methods. If every ranker returns highly relevant items in the top ranks, it becomes difficult to recognize…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Xinyi Yan , Chengxi Luo , Charles L. A. Clarke , Nick Craswell , Ellen M. Voorhees , Pablo Castells

This work investigates the problem of best arm identification for multi-agent multi-armed bandits. We consider $N$ agents grouped into $M$ clusters, where each cluster solves a stochastic bandit problem. The mapping between agents and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Yash , Nikhil Karamchandani , Avishek Ghosh

We study the $K$-armed dueling bandit problem, a variation of the standard stochastic bandit problem where the feedback is limited to relative comparisons of a pair of arms. We introduce a tight asymptotic regret lower bound that is based…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-30 Junpei Komiyama , Junya Honda , Hisashi Kashima , Hiroshi Nakagawa

We propose stochastic rank-$1$ bandits, a class of online learning problems where at each step a learning agent chooses a pair of row and column arms, and receives the product of their values as a reward. The main challenge of the problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-09 Sumeet Katariya , Branislav Kveton , Csaba Szepesvari , Claire Vernade , Zheng Wen

Recently, the study of linear misspecified bandits has generated intriguing implications of the hardness of learning in bandits and reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, Du et al. (2020) show that even if a learner is given linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-31 Jialin Dong , Lin F. Yang

We consider the problem of contextual bandits and imitation learning, where the learner lacks direct knowledge of the executed action's reward. Instead, the learner can actively query an expert at each round to compare two actions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan , Wen Sun , Runzhe Wu

While much progress has been made in understanding the minimax sample complexity of reinforcement learning (RL) -- the complexity of learning on the "worst-case" instance -- such measures of complexity often do not capture the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Andrew Wagenmaker , Kevin Jamieson

We consider the problem of near-optimal arm identification in the fixed confidence setting of the infinitely armed bandit problem when nothing is known about the arm reservoir distribution. We (1) introduce a PAC-like framework within which…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-22 Maryam Aziz , Jesse Anderton , Emilie Kaufmann , Javed Aslam

We study learning of human preferences from a limited comparison feedback. This task is ubiquitous in machine learning. Its applications such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, have been transformational. We formulate this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Kiran Koshy Thekumparampil , Gaurush Hiranandani , Kousha Kalantari , Shoham Sabach , Branislav Kveton

We consider a stochastic bandit problem with a possibly infinite number of arms. We write $p^*$ for the proportion of optimal arms and $\Delta$ for the minimal mean-gap between optimal and sub-optimal arms. We characterize the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-08 Rianne de Heide , James Cheshire , Pierre Ménard , Alexandra Carpentier

The theory of reinforcement learning has focused on two fundamental problems: achieving low regret, and identifying $\epsilon$-optimal policies. While a simple reduction allows one to apply a low-regret algorithm to obtain an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Andrew Wagenmaker , Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson

We study model selection in linear bandits, where the learner must adapt to the dimension (denoted by $d_\star$) of the smallest hypothesis class containing the true linear model while balancing exploration and exploitation. Previous papers…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-17 Yinglun Zhu , Robert Nowak

The probability that a user will click a search result depends both on its relevance and its position on the results page. The position based model explains this behavior by ascribing to every item an attraction probability, and to every…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-21 Sumeet Katariya , Branislav Kveton , Csaba Szepesvári , Claire Vernade , Zheng Wen

We study the problem of selecting $K$ arms with the highest expected rewards in a stochastic $n$-armed bandit game. This problem has a wide range of applications, e.g., A/B testing, crowdsourcing, simulation optimization. Our goal is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-06 Jiecao Chen , Xi Chen , Qin Zhang , Yuan Zhou

The problem of two-sided matching markets is well-studied in computer science and economics, owing to its diverse applications across numerous domains. Since market participants are usually uncertain about their preferences in various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Zilong Wang , Shuai Li

The Plackett-Luce (PL) model is ubiquitous in learning-to-rank (LTR) because it provides a useful and intuitive probabilistic model for sampling ranked lists. Counterfactual offline evaluation and optimization of ranking metrics are pivotal…