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Recently, several studies (Zhou et al., 2021a; Zhang et al., 2021b; Kim et al., 2021; Zhou and Gu, 2022) have provided variance-dependent regret bounds for linear contextual bandits, which interpolates the regret for the worst-case regime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Heyang Zhao , Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Tong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

We study stochastic linear optimization problem with bandit feedback. The set of arms take values in an $N$-dimensional space and belong to a bounded polyhedron described by finitely many linear inequalities. We provide a lower bound for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-09-29 Manjesh K. Hanawal , Amir Leshem , Venkatesh Saligrama

We provide a simple method to combine stochastic bandit algorithms. Our approach is based on a "meta-UCB" procedure that treats each of $N$ individual bandit algorithms as arms in a higher-level $N$-armed bandit problem that we solve with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Ashok Cutkosky , Abhimanyu Das , Manish Purohit

We consider the neural contextual bandit problem. In contrast to the existing work which primarily focuses on ReLU neural nets, we consider a general set of smooth activation functions. Under this more general setting, (i) we derive…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-02 Sudeep Salgia , Sattar Vakili , Qing Zhao

We address a generalization of the bandit with knapsacks problem, where a learner aims to maximize rewards while satisfying an arbitrary set of long-term constraints. Our goal is to design best-of-both-worlds algorithms that perform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Martino Bernasconi , Matteo Castiglioni , Andrea Celli , Federico Fusco

The stochastic contextual bandit problem, which models the trade-off between exploration and exploitation, has many real applications, including recommender systems, online advertising and clinical trials. As many other machine learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-14 Qin Ding , Yue Kang , Yi-Wei Liu , Thomas C. M. Lee , Cho-Jui Hsieh , James Sharpnack

We provide a unified algorithmic framework for ensemble sampling in nonlinear contextual bandits and develop corresponding regret bounds for two most common nonlinear contextual bandit settings: Generalized Linear Ensemble Sampling (GLM-ES)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jiazheng Sun , Weixin Wang , Pan Xu

We address online combinatorial optimization when the player has a prior over the adversary's sequence of losses. In this framework, Russo and Van Roy proposed an information-theoretic analysis of Thompson Sampling based on the information…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-05 Sébastien Bubeck , Mark Sellke

In (online) learning theory the concepts of sparsity, variance and curvature are well-understood and are routinely used to obtain refined regret and generalization bounds. In this paper we further our understanding of these concepts in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-06 Sébastien Bubeck , Michael B. Cohen , Yuanzhi Li

We study Thompson Sampling-based algorithms for stochastic bandits with bounded rewards. As the existing problem-dependent regret bound for Thompson Sampling with Gaussian priors [Agrawal and Goyal, 2017] is vacuous when $T \le 288 e^{64}$,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Bingshan Hu , Zhiming Huang , Tianyue H. Zhang , Mathias Lécuyer , Nidhi Hegde

We study the multi-objective linear contextual bandit problem, where multiple possible conflicting objectives must be optimized simultaneously. We propose \texttt{MOL-TS}, the \textit{first} Thompson Sampling algorithm with Pareto regret…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-02 Somangchan Park , Heesang Ann , Min-hwan Oh

Contextual bandits are incredibly useful in many practical problems. We go one step further by devising a more realistic problem that combines: (1) contextual bandits with dense arm features, (2) non-linear reward functions, and (3) a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Wei Min Loh , Sajib Kumer Sinha , Ankur Agarwal , Pascal Poupart

Fast changing states or volatile environments pose a significant challenge to online optimization, which needs to perform rapid adaptation under limited observation. In this paper, we give query and regret optimal bandit algorithms under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Zhou Lu , Qiuyi Zhang , Xinyi Chen , Fred Zhang , David Woodruff , Elad Hazan

In this paper we consider the problem of online stochastic optimization of a locally smooth function under bandit feedback. We introduce the high-confidence tree (HCT) algorithm, a novel any-time $\mathcal{X}$-armed bandit algorithm, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-05-20 Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar , Alessandro Lazaric , Emma Brunskill

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

We introduce a new model of stochastic bandits with adversarial corruptions which aims to capture settings where most of the input follows a stochastic pattern but some fraction of it can be adversarially changed to trick the algorithm,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-28 Thodoris Lykouris , Vahab Mirrokni , Renato Paes Leme

We study how to learn optimal interventions sequentially given causal information represented as a causal graph along with associated conditional distributions. Causal modeling is useful in real world problems like online advertisement…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-12 Yangyi Lu , Amirhossein Meisami , Ambuj Tewari , Zhenyu Yan

We study a variant of the contextual bandit problem where an agent can intervene through a set of stochastic expert policies. Given a fixed context, each expert samples actions from a fixed conditional distribution. The agent seeks to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Nihal Sharma , Rajat Sen , Soumya Basu , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Sanjay Shakkottai

We consider a multi-armed bandit problem where payoffs are a linear function of an observed stochastic contextual variable. In the scenario where there exists a gap between optimal and suboptimal rewards, several algorithms have been…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2014-07-08 José Bento , Stratis Ioannidis , S. Muthukrishnan , Jinyun Yan

Thompson Sampling (TS) is one of the most effective algorithms for solving contextual multi-armed bandit problems. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, called Neural Thompson Sampling, which adapts deep neural networks for both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Weitong Zhang , Dongruo Zhou , Lihong Li , Quanquan Gu