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Related papers: Adaptive Exploration in Linear Contextual Bandit

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We present an efficient algorithm for linear contextual bandits with adversarial losses and stochastic action sets. Our approach reduces this setting to misspecification-robust adversarial linear bandits with fixed action sets. Without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Tim van Erven , Jack Mayo , Julia Olkhovskaya , Chen-Yu Wei

The stochastic multi-armed bandit problem is a well-known model for studying the exploration-exploitation trade-off. It has significant possible applications in adaptive clinical trials, which allow for dynamic changes in the treatment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Hossein Aboutalebi , Doina Precup , Tibor Schuster

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

We study linear contextual bandits in the misspecified setting, where the expected reward function can be approximated by a linear function class up to a bounded misspecification level $\zeta>0$. We propose an algorithm based on a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-17 Weitong Zhang , Jiafan He , Zhiyuan Fan , Quanquan Gu

We study regret minimization in causal bandits under causal sufficiency where the underlying causal structure is not known to the agent. Previous work has focused on identifying the reward's parents and then applying classic bandit methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Mohammad Shahverdikondori , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash

Recently, several studies (Zhou et al., 2021a; Zhang et al., 2021b; Kim et al., 2021; Zhou and Gu, 2022) have provided variance-dependent regret bounds for linear contextual bandits, which interpolates the regret for the worst-case regime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Heyang Zhao , Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Tong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

We use surrogate losses to obtain several new regret bounds and new algorithms for contextual bandit learning. Using the ramp loss, we derive new margin-based regret bounds in terms of standard sequential complexity measures of a benchmark…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-06 Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy

We study the fundamental limits of learning in contextual bandits, where a learner's rewards depend on their actions and a known context, which extends the canonical multi-armed bandit to the case where side-information is available. We are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-13 Moise Blanchard , Steve Hanneke , Patrick Jaillet

Thompson Sampling is one of the oldest heuristics for multi-armed bandit problems. It is a randomized algorithm based on Bayesian ideas, and has recently generated significant interest after several studies demonstrated it to have better…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-04 Shipra Agrawal , Navin Goyal

Combinatorial multi-armed bandits provide a fundamental online decision-making environment where a decision-maker interacts with an environment across $T$ time steps, each time selecting an action and learning the cost of that action. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Gerdus Benadè , Rathish Das , Thomas Lavastida

In this paper we consider the adversarial contextual bandit problem in metric spaces. The paper "Nearest neighbour with bandit feedback" tackled this problem but when there are many contexts near the decision boundary of the comparator…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Stephen Pasteris , Chris Hicks , Vasilios Mavroudis

In this research, we investigate the high-dimensional linear contextual bandit problem where the number of features $p$ is greater than the budget $T$, or it may even be infinite. Differing from the majority of previous works in this field,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-27 Junpei Komiyama , Masaaki Imaizumi

We study the problem of meta-learning several contextual stochastic bandits tasks by leveraging their concentration around a low-dimensional affine subspace, which we learn via online principal component analysis to reduce the expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Steven Bilaj , Sofien Dhouib , Setareh Maghsudi

We consider the problem of designing contextual bandit algorithms in the ``cross-learning'' setting of Balseiro et al., where the learner observes the loss for the action they play in all possible contexts, not just the context of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-04 Jon Schneider , Julian Zimmert

Online decision-making problem requires us to make a sequence of decisions based on incremental information. Common solutions often need to learn a reward model of different actions given the contextual information and then maximize the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-15 Haoyu Chen , Wenbin Lu , Rui Song

We present the first high-probability optimal regret bound for a policy optimization technique applied to the problem of stochastic contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) with general offline function approximation. Our algorithm is both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Orin Levy , Yishay Mansour

We study social learning dynamics motivated by reviews on online platforms. The agents collectively follow a simple multi-armed bandit protocol, but each agent acts myopically, without regards to exploration. We allow the greedy…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-04-11 Kiarash Banihashem , MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi , Suho Shin , Aleksandrs Slivkins

In linear contextual bandits, the objective is to select actions that maximize cumulative rewards, modeled as a linear function with unknown parameters. Although Thompson Sampling performs well empirically, it does not achieve optimal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-18 Wonyoung Kim

Motivated by problems of learning to rank long item sequences, we introduce a variant of the cascading bandit model that considers flexible length sequences with varying rewards and losses. We formulate two generative models for this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-05 Anirban Santara , Claudio Gentile , Gaurav Aggarwal , Shuai Li

Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-07 Branislav Kveton , Martin Mladenov , Chih-Wei Hsu , Manzil Zaheer , Csaba Szepesvari , Craig Boutilier