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We consider the problem of sequentially making decisions that are rewarded by "successes" and "failures" which can be predicted through an unknown relationship that depends on a partially controllable vector of attributes for each instance.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-09-18 Yingfei Wang , Chu Wang , Warren Powell

We consider the development of adaptive, instance-dependent algorithms for interactive decision making (bandits, reinforcement learning, and beyond) that, rather than only performing well in the worst case, adapt to favorable properties of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-26 Andrew Wagenmaker , Dylan J. Foster

We study best-arm identification in stochastic dueling bandits under the sole assumption that a Condorcet winner exists, i.e., an arm that wins each noisy pairwise comparison with probability at least $1/2$. We introduce a new…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-17 El Mehdi Saad , Victor Thuot , Nicolas Verzelen

We study several questions in the reliable agnostic learning framework of Kalai et al. (2009), which captures learning tasks in which one type of error is costlier than others. A positive reliable classifier is one that makes no false…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-25 Varun Kanade , Justin Thaler

We study the active learning problem of top-$k$ ranking from multi-wise comparisons under the popular multinomial logit model. Our goal is to identify the top-$k$ items with high probability by adaptively querying sets for comparisons and…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-08-01 Xi Chen , Yuanzhi Li , Jieming Mao

We study the problem of PAC learning $\gamma$-margin halfspaces with Random Classification Noise. We establish an information-computation tradeoff suggesting an inherent gap between the sample complexity of the problem and the sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Ilias Diakonikolas , Jelena Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Puqian Wang , Nikos Zarifis

PAC-Bayesian set up involves a stochastic classifier characterized by a posterior distribution on a classifier set, offers a high probability bound on its averaged true risk and is robust to the training sample used. For a given posterior,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-17 Puja Sahu , Nandyala Hemachandra

Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the policy employed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. The analytical formulation usually takes the form of a Constrained Markov Decision Process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-03 Aria HasanzadeZonuzy , Archana Bura , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai

Let $f(\theta, X_1),$ $ \dots,$ $ f(\theta, X_n)$ be a sequence of random elements, where $f$ is a fixed scalar function, $X_1, \dots, X_n$ are independent random variables (data), and $\theta$ is a random parameter distributed according to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Ilja Kuzborskij , Kwang-Sung Jun , Yulian Wu , Kyoungseok Jang , Francesco Orabona

In-context learning (ICL) adapts large language models by conditioning on a small set of ICL examples, avoiding costly parameter updates. Among other factors, performance is often highly sensitive to the ordering of the examples. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Pawel Batorski , Paul Swoboda

This paper considers the problem of online clustering with bandit feedback. A set of arms (or items) can be partitioned into various groups that are unknown. Within each group, the observations associated to each of the arms follow the same…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Junwen Yang , Zixin Zhong , Vincent Y. F. Tan

We investigate the problem of best-policy identification in discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the learner has access to a generative model. The objective is to devise a learning algorithm returning the best policy as early as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-11 Aymen Al Marjani , Alexandre Proutiere

In this paper, we consider the problem of replicable realizable PAC learning. We construct a particularly hard learning problem and show a sample complexity lower bound with a close to $(\log|H|)^{3/2}$ dependence on the size of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Kasper Green Larsen , Markus Engelund Mathiasen , Chirag Pabbaraju , Clement Svendsen

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

Learning paradigms based purely on offline data as well as those based solely on sequential online learning have been well-studied in the literature. In this paper, we consider combining offline data with online learning, an area less…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Shubhada Agrawal , Sandeep Juneja , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Arun Sai Suggala

We consider the problem of best arm identification in the multi-armed bandit model, under fixed confidence. Given a confidence input $\delta$, the goal is to identify the arm with the highest mean reward with a probability of at least 1 --…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-21 El Mehdi Saad , Gilles Blanchard , Nicolas Verzelen

The best arm identification problem (BEST-1-ARM) is the most basic pure exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits. The problem has a long history and attracted significant attention for the last decade. However, we do not yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-30 Lijie Chen , Jian Li

We consider the problem of learning an unknown subset $N_\text{target}$ of a domain in an online setting. In each round $t$, the learner predicts a set of items ${N}_t$ and receives one of two types of feedback, each with equal probability:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Lee Cohen , Yishay Mansour , Shay Moran , Han Shao

We consider an extension of the contextual multi-armed bandit problem, in which, instead of selecting a single alternative (arm), a learner is supposed to make a preselection in the form of a subset of alternatives. More specifically, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-12 Adil El Mesaoudi-Paul , Viktor Bengs , Eyke Hüllermeier

Multi-distribution learning is a natural generalization of PAC learning to settings with multiple data distributions. There remains a significant gap between the known upper and lower bounds for PAC-learnable classes. In particular, though…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Pranjal Awasthi , Nika Haghtalab , Eric Zhao