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Related papers: Smoothness-Adaptive Contextual Bandits

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We study the problem of pure exploration in matching markets under uncertain preferences, where the goal is to identify a stable matching with confidence parameter $\delta$ and minimal sample complexity. Agents learn preferences via…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Tejas Pagare , Agniv Bandyopadhyay , Sandeep Juneja

We study the problem of stochastic contextual bandits in the agnostic setting, where the goal is to compete with the best policy in a given class without assuming realizability or imposing model restrictions on losses or rewards. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-06 Samuel Girard , Aurelien Bibaut , Arthur Gretton , Nathan Kallus , Houssam Zenati

This thesis aims to study some of the mathematical challenges that arise in the analysis of statistical sequential decision-making algorithms for postoperative patients follow-up. Stochastic bandits (multiarmed, contextual) model the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-06 Patrick Saux

The improving multi-armed bandits problem is a formal model for allocating effort under uncertainty, motivated by scenarios such as investing research effort into new technologies, performing clinical trials, and hyperparameter selection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Avrim Blum , Marten Garicano , Kavya Ravichandran , Dravyansh Sharma

In digital health and EdTech, recommendation systems face a significant challenge: users often choose impulsively, in ways that conflict with the platform's long-term payoffs. This misalignment makes it difficult to effectively learn to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-22 Arpit Agarwal , Rad Niazadeh , Prathamesh Patil

In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-15 Tommaso Giovannelli , Jingfu Tan , Luis Nunes Vicente

We study an interesting variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, called the Fair-SMAB problem, where each arm is required to be pulled for at least a given fraction of the total available rounds. We investigate the interplay…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-24 Vishakha Patil , Ganesh Ghalme , Vineet Nair , Y. Narahari

Multi-armed bandit problems are considered as a paradigm of the trade-off between exploring the environment to find profitable actions and exploiting what is already known. In the stationary case, the distributions of the rewards do not…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2008-12-18 Aurélien Garivier , Eric Moulines

We consider the problem of adversarial bandit convex optimization, that is, online learning over a sequence of arbitrary convex loss functions with only one function evaluation for each of them. While all previous works assume known and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Haipeng Luo , Mengxiao Zhang , Peng Zhao

In this paper, we study a slate bandit problem where the function that determines the slate-level reward is non-separable: the optimal value of the function cannot be determined by learning the optimal action for each slot. We are mainly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-04-22 Jason Rhuggenaath , Alp Akcay , Yingqian Zhang , Uzay Kaymak

A key feature of sequential decision making under uncertainty is a need to balance between exploiting--choosing the best action according to the current knowledge, and exploring--obtaining information about values of other actions. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-27 Dimitrije Markovic , Hrvoje Stojic , Sarah Schwoebel , Stefan J. Kiebel

We consider the problem of decision-making under uncertainty in an environment with safety constraints. Many business and industrial applications rely on real-time optimization to improve key performance indicators. In the case of unknown…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Buse Sibel Korkmaz , Marta Zagórowska , Mehmet Mercangöz

Recent work has considered natural variations of the multi-armed bandit problem, where the reward distribution of each arm is a special function of the time passed since its last pulling. In this direction, a simple (yet widely applicable)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Alexia Atsidakou , Orestis Papadigenopoulos , Soumya Basu , Constantine Caramanis , Sanjay Shakkottai

The multi-armed bandit problem is a classical decision-making problem where an agent has to learn an optimal action balancing exploration and exploitation. Properly managing this trade-off requires a correct assessment of uncertainty; in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Fabio Massimo Zennaro , Audun Jøsang

Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-18 Maria Dimakopoulou , Zhengyuan Zhou , Susan Athey , Guido Imbens

We propose the first fully-adaptive algorithm for pure exploration in linear bandits---the task to find the arm with the largest expected reward, which depends on an unknown parameter linearly. While existing methods partially or entirely…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-10-17 Liyuan Xu , Junya Honda , Masashi Sugiyama

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

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

Adapting to a priori unknown noise level is a very important but challenging problem in sequential decision-making as efficient exploration typically requires knowledge of the noise level, which is often loosely specified. We report…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-11 Kwang-Sung Jun , Jungtaek Kim

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