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

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This paper studies the Best-of-K Bandit game: At each time the player chooses a subset S among all N-choose-K possible options and observes reward max(X(i) : i in S) where X is a random vector drawn from a joint distribution. The objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-22 Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson , Benjamin Recht

Multi-Armed-Bandit frameworks have often been used by researchers to assess educational interventions, however, recent work has shown that it is more beneficial for a student to provide qualitative feedback through preference elicitation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Nayan Saxena , Pan Chen , Emmy Liu

We consider the problem of learning the optimal action-value function in the discounted-reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). We prove a new PAC bound on the sample-complexity of model-based value iteration algorithm in the presence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-03 Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar , Remi Munos , Bert Kappen

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

We propose and study a new model for reinforcement learning with rich observations, generalizing contextual bandits to sequential decision making. These models require an agent to take actions based on observations (features) with the goal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-31 Akshay Krishnamurthy , Alekh Agarwal , John Langford

Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization is widely used in offline decision-making and offers several benefits, motivating recent work on the sample complexity of offline learning with respect to KL-regularized performance metrics.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Kaixuan Ji , Qiwei Di , Heyang Zhao , Qingyue Zhao , Quanquan Gu

In this paper, we consider the contextual variant of the MNL-Bandit problem. More specifically, we consider a dynamic set optimization problem, where a decision-maker offers a subset (assortment) of products to a consumer and observes the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Priyank Agrawal , Theja Tulabandhula , Vashist Avadhanula

This paper studies the problem of adaptively sampling from K distributions (arms) in order to identify the largest gap between any two adjacent means. We call this the MaxGap-bandit problem. This problem arises naturally in approximate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-04 Sumeet Katariya , Ardhendu Tripathy , Robert Nowak

Ensemble learning plays a crucial role in practical applications of online learning due to its enhanced classification performance and adaptable adjustment mechanisms. However, most weight allocation strategies in ensemble learning are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Songqiao Hu , Zeyi Liu , Xiao He

This paper proposes a variant of multiple-play stochastic bandits tailored to resource allocation problems arising from LLM applications, edge intelligence, etc. The model is composed of $M$ arms and $K$ plays. Each arm has a stochastic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Hong Xie , Haoran Gu , Yanying Huang , Tao Tan , Defu Lian

Motivated by the need to efficiently identify multiple candidates in high trial-and-error cost tasks such as drug discovery, we propose a near-optimal algorithm to identify all {\epsilon}-best arms (i.e., those at most {\epsilon} worse than…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-02 Zhekai Li , Tianyi Ma , Cheng Hua , Ruihao Zhu

In many online decision processes, the optimizing agent is called to choose between large numbers of alternatives with many inherent similarities; in turn, these similarities imply closely correlated losses that may confound standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Matthieu Martin , Panayotis Mertikopoulos , Thibaud Rahier , Houssam Zenati

We study an online decision making problem where on each round a learner chooses a list of items based on some side information, receives a scalar feedback value for each individual item, and a reward that is linearly related to this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-07 Akshay Krishnamurthy , Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudik

Most learning to rank research has assumed that the utility of different documents is independent, which results in learned ranking functions that return redundant results. The few approaches that avoid this have rather unsatisfyingly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-09-04 Aleksandrs Slivkins , Filip Radlinski , Sreenivas Gollapudi

This paper studies two variants of the best arm identification (BAI) problem under the streaming model, where we have a stream of $n$ arms with reward distributions supported on $[0,1]$ with unknown means. The arms in the stream are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Tianyuan Jin , Keke Huang , Jing Tang , Xiaokui Xiao

This paper considers ranking inference of $n$ items based on the observed data on the top choice among $M$ randomly selected items at each trial. This is a useful modification of the Plackett-Luce model for $M$-way ranking with only the top…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-09 Jianqing Fan , Zhipeng Lou , Weichen Wang , Mengxin Yu

We introduce the problem of model selection for contextual bandits, where a learner must adapt to the complexity of the optimal policy while balancing exploration and exploitation. Our main result is a new model selection guarantee for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-15 Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Haipeng Luo

We study a ranking and selection problem of learning from choice-based feedback with dynamic assortments. In this problem, a company sequentially displays a set of items to a population of customers and collects their choices as feedback.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Junwen Yang , Yifan Feng

We consider sequential decision making under uncertainty, where the goal is to optimize over a large decision space using noisy comparative feedback. This problem can be formulated as a $K$-armed Dueling Bandits problem where $K$ is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-11 Yanan Sui , Yisong Yue , Joel W. Burdick

Reinforcement learning addresses the dilemma between exploration to find profitable actions and exploitation to act according to the best observations already made. Bandit problems are one such class of problems in stateless environments…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-02-20 Ananda Narayanan B , Balaraman Ravindran