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We study a new class of online learning problems where each of the online algorithm's actions is assigned an adversarial value, and the loss of the algorithm at each step is a known and deterministic function of the values assigned to its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-05-20 Ofer Dekel , Jian Ding , Tomer Koren , Yuval Peres

Contextual bandits are a central framework for sequential decision-making, with applications ranging from recommendation systems to clinical trials. While nonparametric methods can flexibly model complex reward structures, they suffer from…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-01 Wanteng Ma , T. Tony Cai

We study a noise model for linear stochastic bandits for which the subgaussian noise parameter vanishes linearly as we select actions on the unit sphere closer and closer to the unknown vector. We introduce an algorithm for this problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Josep Lumbreras , Marco Tomamichel

We study the multinomial logit (MNL) bandit problem, where at each time step, the seller offers an assortment of size at most $K$ from a pool of $N$ items, and the buyer purchases an item from the assortment according to a MNL choice model.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Jiaqi Yang

Stochastic linear bandits are a fundamental model for sequential decision making, where an agent selects a vector-valued action and receives a noisy reward with expected value given by an unknown linear function. Although well studied in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Bruce Huang , Ruida Zhou , Lin F. Yang , Suhas Diggavi

We investigate the problem of stochastic, combinatorial multi-armed bandits where the learner only has access to bandit feedback and the reward function can be non-linear. We provide a general framework for adapting discrete offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Guanyu Nie , Yididiya Y Nadew , Yanhui Zhu , Vaneet Aggarwal , Christopher John Quinn

We study the adversarial multi-armed bandit problem and create a completely online algorithmic framework that is invariant under arbitrary translations and scales of the arm losses. We study the expected performance of our algorithm against…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Kaan Gokcesu , Hakan Gokcesu

Online decision-making can be formulated as the popular stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where a learner makes decisions (or takes actions) to maximize cumulative rewards collected from an unknown environment. This paper proposes to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-26 Jonathan Gornet , Mehdi Hosseinzadeh , Bruno Sinopoli

We consider the multinomial logistic bandit problem in which a learner interacts with an environment by selecting actions to maximize expected rewards based on probabilistic feedback from multiple possible outcomes. In the binary setting,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-25 Pierre Boudart , Pierre Gaillard , Alessandro Rudi

We study decentralized stochastic linear bandits, where a network of $N$ agents acts cooperatively to efficiently solve a linear bandit-optimization problem over a $d$-dimensional space. For this problem, we propose DLUCB: a fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Sanae Amani , Christos Thrampoulidis

We consider (stochastic) softmax policy gradient (PG) methods for bandits and tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs). While the PG objective is non-concave, recent research has used the objective's smoothness and gradient domination…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Michael Lu , Matin Aghaei , Anant Raj , Sharan Vaswani

Safety is a desirable property that can immensely increase the applicability of learning algorithms in real-world decision-making problems. It is much easier for a company to deploy an algorithm that is safe, i.e., guaranteed to perform at…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-07 Abbas Kazerouni , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Benjamin Van Roy

In this paper, we study a family of conservative bandit problems (CBPs) with sample-path reward constraints, i.e., the learner's reward performance must be at least as well as a given baseline at any time. We propose a One-Size-Fits-All…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-08 Yihan Du , Siwei Wang , Longbo Huang

We study a generalization of the problem of online learning in adversarial linear contextual bandits by incorporating loss functions that belong to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, which allows for a more flexible modeling of complex…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-04 Gergely Neu , Julia Olkhovskaya , Sattar Vakili

In stochastic contextual bandits, an agent sequentially makes actions from a time-dependent action set based on past experience to minimize the cumulative regret. Like many other machine learning algorithms, the performance of bandits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Yue Kang , Cho-Jui Hsieh , Thomas C. M. Lee

This paper studies a bandit optimization problem where the goal is to maximize a function $f(x)$ over $T$ periods for some unknown strongly concave function $f$. We consider a new pairwise comparison oracle, where the decision-maker chooses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Xiangyu Chang , Xi Chen , Yining Wang , Zhiyi Zeng

We develop a novel and generic algorithm for the adversarial multi-armed bandit problem (or more generally the combinatorial semi-bandit problem). When instantiated differently, our algorithm achieves various new data-dependent regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-08 Chen-Yu Wei , Haipeng Luo

We consider the minimax setup for the two-armed bandit problem as applied to data processing if there are two alternative processing methods available with different a priori unknown efficiencies. One should determine the most effective…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-05-30 Alexander Kolnogorov , Alexander Nazin , Dmitry Shiyan

Multi-objective combinatorial optimization seeks Pareto-optimal solutions over exponentially large discrete spaces, yet existing methods sacrifice generality, scalability, or theoretical guarantees. We reformulate it as an online learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Esha Singh , Dongxia Wu , Chien-Yi Yang , Tajana Rosing , Rose Yu , Yi-An Ma

In many fields such as digital marketing, healthcare, finance, and robotics, it is common to have a well-tested and reliable baseline policy running in production (e.g., a recommender system). Nonetheless, the baseline policy is often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-11 Evrard Garcelon , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Alessandro Lazaric , Matteo Pirotta