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Related papers: Simple Regret Minimization for Contextual Bandits

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In this paper, we investigate the impact of context diversity on stochastic linear contextual bandits. As opposed to the previous view that contexts lead to more difficult bandit learning, we show that when the contexts are sufficiently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Weiqiang Wu , Jing Yang , Cong Shen

We design and implement an adaptive experiment (a ``contextual bandit'') to learn a targeted treatment assignment policy, where the goal is to use a participant's survey responses to determine which charity to expose them to in a donation…

In this paper, we provide the first investigation into adaptive combinatorial experimental design, focusing on the trade-off between regret minimization and statistical power in combinatorial multi-armed bandits (CMAB). While minimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Hongrui Xie , Junyu Cao , Kan Xu

We study a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, where at each time step, the player observes an independently sampled context that determines the arms' mean rewards. However, playing an arm blocks it (across all contexts) for a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Soumya Basu , Orestis Papadigenopoulos , Constantine Caramanis , Sanjay Shakkottai

We consider regret minimization in a general collaborative multi-agent multi-armed bandit model, in which each agent faces a finite set of arms and may communicate with other agents through a central controller. The optimal arm for each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Amitis Shidani , Sattar Vakili

Contextual bandits are a rich model for sequential decision making given side information, with important applications, e.g., in recommender systems. We propose novel algorithms for contextual bandits harnessing neural networks to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-01 Parnian Kassraie , Andreas Krause

A contextual bandit problem is studied in a highly non-stationary environment, which is ubiquitous in various recommender systems due to the time-varying interests of users. Two models with disjoint and hybrid payoffs are considered to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Xiao Xu , Fang Dong , Yanghua Li , Shaojian He , Xin Li

We study the problem of stochastic contextual bandits in the agnostic setting, where the goal is to compete with the best policy in a given class without assuming realizability or imposing model restrictions on losses or rewards. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-06 Samuel Girard , Aurelien Bibaut , Arthur Gretton , Nathan Kallus , Houssam Zenati

We study contextual bandits with low-rank structure where, in each round, if the (context, arm) pair $(i,j)\in [m]\times [n]$ is selected, the learner observes a noisy sample of the $(i,j)$-th entry of an unknown low-rank reward matrix.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Yassir Jedra , William Réveillard , Stefan Stojanovic , Alexandre Proutiere

This paper introduces the framework of multi-armed sampling, which serves as the sampling counterpart to the optimization problem of multi-armed bandits. Our primary motivation is to rigorously examine the exploration-exploitation trade-off…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Mohammad Pedramfar , Siamak Ravanbakhsh

We consider the contextual bandit problem where at each time, the agent only has access to a noisy version of the context and the error variance (or an estimator of this variance). This setting is motivated by a wide range of applications…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-19 Yongyi Guo , Ziping Xu , Susan Murphy

We study the contextual linear bandit problem, a version of the standard stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem where a learner sequentially selects actions to maximize a reward which depends also on a user provided per-round context.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-02 Roshan Shariff , Or Sheffet

We study the problem of determining the best intervention in a Causal Bayesian Network (CBN) specified only by its causal graph. We model this as a stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem with side-information, where the interventions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Aurghya Maiti , Vineet Nair , Gaurav Sinha

We examine a multi-armed bandit problem with contextual information, where the objective is to ensure that each arm receives a minimum aggregated reward across contexts while simultaneously maximizing the total cumulative reward. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Ahmed Ben Yahmed , Hafedh El Ferchichi , Marc Abeille , Vianney Perchet

The cross-learning contextual bandit problem with graphical feedback has recently attracted significant attention. In this setting, there is a contextual bandit with a feedback graph over the arms, and pulling an arm reveals the loss for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Ruiyuan Huang , Zengfeng Huang

We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting and study the problem of constrained regret minimization over a given time horizon. Each arm is associated with an unknown, possibly multi-dimensional distribution, and the merit of an arm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Anmol Kagrecha , Jayakrishnan Nair , Krishna Jagannathan

Multi-armed bandit problems are the most basic examples of sequential decision problems with an exploration-exploitation trade-off. This is the balance between staying with the option that gave highest payoffs in the past and exploring new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-11-06 Sébastien Bubeck , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

Contextual bandit learning is a reinforcement learning problem where the learner repeatedly receives a set of features (context), takes an action and receives a reward based on the action and context. We consider this problem under a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-05 Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudík , Satyen Kale , John Langford , Robert E. Schapire

We consider best arm identification in the multi-armed bandit problem. Assuming certain continuity conditions of the prior, we characterize the rate of the Bayesian simple regret. Differing from Bayesian regret minimization (Lai, 1987), the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-27 Junpei Komiyama , Kaito Ariu , Masahiro Kato , Chao Qin

We investigate contextual bandits in the presence of side-observations across arms in order to design recommendation algorithms for users connected via social networks. Users in social networks respond to their friends' activity, and hence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Rahul Singh , Fang Liu , Xin Liu , Ness Shroff