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We consider linear stochastic bandits where the set of actions is an ellipsoid. We provide the first known minimax optimal algorithm for this problem. We first derive a novel information-theoretic lower bound on the regret of any algorithm,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-25 Raymond Zhang , Hedi Hadiji , Richard Combes

We introduce a novel extension of the canonical multi-armed bandit problem that incorporates an additional strategic innovation: abstention. In this enhanced framework, the agent is not only tasked with selecting an arm at each time step,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Junwen Yang , Tianyuan Jin , Vincent Y. F. Tan

Online reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) remains less theoretically and algorithmically developed than its episodic counterpart, with many algorithms suffering from high ``burn-in'' costs and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Guy Zamir , Matthew Zurek , Yudong Chen

We study a novel multi-armed bandit problem that models the challenge faced by a company wishing to explore new strategies to maximize revenue whilst simultaneously maintaining their revenue above a fixed baseline, uniformly over time.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-02-16 Yifan Wu , Roshan Shariff , Tor Lattimore , Csaba Szepesvári

We study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with non-equivalent multiple plays where, at each step, an agent chooses not only a set of arms, but also their order, which influences reward distribution. In several problem formulations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-20 Aleksandr Vorobev , Gleb Gusev

We consider a stochastic bandit problem with infinitely many arms. In this setting, the learner has no chance of trying all the arms even once and has to dedicate its limited number of samples only to a certain number of arms. All previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-05-19 Alexandra Carpentier , Michal Valko

We propose two linear bandits algorithms with per-step complexity sublinear in the number of arms $K$. The algorithms are designed for applications where the arm set is extremely large and slowly changing. Our key realization is that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-13 Shuo Yang , Tongzheng Ren , Sanjay Shakkottai , Eric Price , Inderjit S. Dhillon , Sujay Sanghavi

Most bandit algorithms assume that the reward variances or their upper bounds are known, and that they are the same for all arms. This naturally leads to suboptimal performance and higher regret due to variance overestimation. On the other…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Aadirupa Saha , Branislav Kveton

This work focuses on the setting of dynamic regret in the context of online learning with full information. In particular, we analyze regret bounds with respect to the temporal variability of the loss functions. By assuming that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Nicolò Campolongo , Francesco Orabona

We study the problem of regret minimization in a multi-armed bandit setup where the agent is allowed to play multiple arms at each round by spreading the resources usually allocated to only one arm. At each iteration the agent selects a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Matias I. Müller , Cristian R. Rojas

We study the linear contextual bandit problem in the presence of adversarial corruption, where the reward at each round is corrupted by an adversary, and the corruption level (i.e., the sum of corruption magnitudes over the horizon) is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Tong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

In a low-rank linear bandit problem, the reward of an action (represented by a matrix of size $d_1 \times d_2$) is the inner product between the action and an unknown low-rank matrix $\Theta^*$. We propose an algorithm based on a novel…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-20 Yangyi Lu , Amirhossein Meisami , Ambuj Tewari

In citep{Hazan-2008-extract}, the authors showed that the regret of online linear optimization can be bounded by the total variation of the cost vectors. In this paper, we extend this result to general online convex optimization. We first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-06-15 Tianbao Yang , Mehrdad Mahdavi , Rong Jin , Shenghuo Zhu

Stochastic and adversarial data are two widely studied settings in online learning. But many optimization tasks are neither i.i.d. nor fully adversarial, which makes it of fundamental interest to get a better theoretical understanding of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-09 Sarah Sachs , Hédi Hadiji , Tim van Erven , Cristóbal Guzmán

We study the benefits of sparsity in nonparametric contextual bandit problems, in which the set of candidate features is countably or uncountably infinite. Our contribution is two-fold. First, using a novel reduction to sequences of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-16 Hamish Flynn , Julia Olkhovskaya , Paul Rognon-Vael

We consider the problem of online control of systems with time-varying linear dynamics. This is a general formulation that is motivated by the use of local linearization in control of nonlinear dynamical systems. To state meaningful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Paula Gradu , Elad Hazan , Edgar Minasyan

We study an important variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, which takes penalization into consideration. Instead of directly maximizing cumulative expected reward, we need to balance between the total reward and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-16 Guanhua Fang , Ping Li , Gennady Samorodnitsky

In this paper we study the non-stationary stochastic optimization question with bandit feedback and dynamic regret measures. The seminal work of Besbes et al. (2015) shows that, when aggregated function changes is known a priori, a simple…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-12 Yining Wang

We study the problem of dynamic regret minimization in online convex optimization, in which the objective is to minimize the difference between the cumulative loss of an algorithm and that of an arbitrary sequence of comparators. While the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Andrew Jacobsen , Francesco Orabona

We establish strong laws of large numbers and central limit theorems for the regret of two of the most popular bandit algorithms: Thompson sampling and UCB. Here, our characterizations of the regret distribution complement the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Lin Fan , Peter W. Glynn