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Autonomous selection of optimal options for data collection from multiple alternatives is challenging in uncertain environments. When secondary information about options is accessible, such problems can be framed as contextual multi-armed…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Shohei Wakayama , Alberto Candela , Paul Hayne , Nisar Ahmed

A standard assumption in contextual multi-arm bandit is that the true context is perfectly known before arm selection. Nonetheless, in many practical applications (e.g., cloud resource management), prior to arm selection, the context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Jianyi Yang , Shaolei Ren

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

Contextual bandits are a form of multi-armed bandit in which the agent has access to predictive side information (known as the context) for each arm at each time step, and have been used to model personalized news recommendation, ad…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-05-25 Aniket Anand Deshmukh , Urun Dogan , Clayton Scott

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…

Standard Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problems assume that the arms are independent. However, in many application scenarios, the information obtained by playing an arm provides information about the remainder of the arms. Hence, in such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-10-30 Onur Atan , Cem Tekin , Mihaela van der Schaar

We study the $K$-armed contextual dueling bandit problem, a sequential decision making setting in which the learner uses contextual information to make two decisions, but only observes \emph{preference-based feedback} suggesting that one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-25 Aadirupa Saha , Akshay Krishnamurthy

We study the contextual multi-armed bandit problem with a finite context space (a.k.a. subpopulations), where the learner recommends a best action for each context and is evaluated by context-weighted simple regret. Our guarantees are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Mohammad Shahverdikondori , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash

Dueling bandits is a prominent framework for decision-making involving preferential feedback, a valuable feature that fits various applications involving human interaction, such as ranking, information retrieval, and recommendation systems.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Qiwei Di , Tao Jin , Yue Wu , Heyang Zhao , Farzad Farnoud , Quanquan Gu

In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, instance-dependent algorithms attain improved performance on "easy" problems with a gap between the best and second-best arm. Are similar guarantees possible for contextual bandits? While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin , David Simchi-Levi , Yunzong Xu

In this paper, we propose a constant word (RAM model) algorithm for regret minimisation for both finite and infinite Stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) instances. Most of the existing regret minimisation algorithms need to remember the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-25 Arghya Roy Chaudhuri , Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan

Strategic behavior against sequential learning methods, such as "click framing" in real recommendation systems, have been widely observed. Motivated by such behavior we study the problem of combinatorial multi-armed bandits (CMAB) under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-22 Jing Dong , Ke Li , Shuai Li , Baoxiang Wang

The Rising Multi-Armed Bandit (RMAB) framework models environments where expected rewards of arms increase with plays, which models practical scenarios where performance of each option improves with the repeated usage, such as in robotics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Seockbean Song , Chenyu Gan , Youngsik Yoon , Siwei Wang , Wei Chen , Jungseul Ok

Contextual multi-armed bandits are a popular choice to model sequential decision-making. E.g., in a healthcare application we may perform various tests to asses a patient condition (exploration) and then decide on the best treatment to give…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Mirco Mutti , Jeongyeol Kwon , Shie Mannor , Aviv Tamar

We consider the problem of contextual bandits and imitation learning, where the learner lacks direct knowledge of the executed action's reward. Instead, the learner can actively query an expert at each round to compare two actions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan , Wen Sun , Runzhe Wu

In human-computer interaction applications like hand gesture recognition, supervised learning models are often trained on a large population of users to achieve high task accuracy. However, due to individual variability in sensor signals…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Duke Lin , Michael Paskett , Ying Yang

Motivated by modern applications, such as online advertisement and recommender systems, we study the top-$k$ extreme contextual bandits problem, where the total number of arms can be enormous, and the learner is allowed to select $k$ arms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-17 Rajat Sen , Alexander Rakhlin , Lexing Ying , Rahul Kidambi , Dean Foster , Daniel Hill , Inderjit Dhillon

We consider the regret minimization task in a dueling bandits problem with context information. In every round of the sequential decision problem, the learner makes a context-dependent selection of two choice alternatives (arms) to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Viktor Bengs , Aadirupa Saha , Eyke Hüllermeier

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

Multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a class of online learning problems where a learning agent aims to maximize its expected cumulative reward while repeatedly selecting to pull arms with unknown reward distributions. We consider a scenario where…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-25 Yang Cao , Zheng Wen , Branislav Kveton , Yao Xie