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In stochastic contextual bandit (SCB) problems, an agent selects an action based on certain observed context to maximize the cumulative reward over iterations. Recently there have been a few studies using a deep neural network (DNN) to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-23 Tan Zhu , Guannan Liang , Chunjiang Zhu , Haining Li , Jinbo Bi

Many applications require optimizing an unknown, noisy function that is expensive to evaluate. We formalize this task as a multi-armed bandit problem, where the payoff function is either sampled from a Gaussian process (GP) or has low RKHS…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-13 Niranjan Srinivas , Andreas Krause , Sham M. Kakade , Matthias Seeger

We consider a novel multi-armed bandit framework where the rewards obtained by pulling the arms are functions of a common latent random variable. The correlation between arms due to the common random source can be used to design a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-31 Samarth Gupta , Gauri Joshi , Osman Yağan

In this paper, we investigate the stochastic contextual bandit with general function space and graph feedback. We propose an algorithm that addresses this problem by adapting to both the underlying graph structures and reward gaps. To the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Xueping Gong , Jiheng Zhang

In this paper, we study utilizing neural networks for the exploitation and exploration of contextual multi-armed bandits. Contextual multi-armed bandits have been studied for decades with various applications. To solve the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yikun Ban , Yuchen Yan , Arindam Banerjee , Jingrui He

The multi-armed bandit formalism has been extensively studied under various attack models, in which an adversary can modify the reward revealed to the player. Previous studies focused on scenarios where the attack value either is bounded at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Ziwei Guan , Kaiyi Ji , Donald J Bucci , Timothy Y Hu , Joseph Palombo , Michael Liston , Yingbin Liang

We study contextual bandits in the presence of a stage-wise constraint when the constraint must be satisfied both with high probability and in expectation. We start with the linear case where both the reward function and the stage-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Aldo Pacchiano , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Peter Bartlett

We consider the neural contextual bandit problem. In contrast to the existing work which primarily focuses on ReLU neural nets, we consider a general set of smooth activation functions. Under this more general setting, (i) we derive…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-02 Sudeep Salgia , Sattar Vakili , Qing Zhao

In this work, we address the open problem of finding low-complexity near-optimal multi-armed bandit algorithms for sequential decision making problems. Existing bandit algorithms are either sub-optimal and computationally simple (e.g.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-18 Fang Liu , Sinong Wang , Swapna Buccapatnam , Ness Shroff

Balancing exploration and exploitation (EE) is a fundamental problem in contex-tual bandit. One powerful principle for EE trade-off isOptimism in Face of Uncer-tainty(OFU), in which the agent takes the action according to an upper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-30 Yichi Zhou , Shihong Song , Huishuai Zhang , Jun Zhu , Wei Chen , Tie-Yan Liu

In this paper, we propose a novel neural exploration strategy in contextual bandits, EE-Net, distinct from the standard UCB-based and TS-based approaches. Contextual multi-armed bandits have been studied for decades with various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-16 Yikun Ban , Yuchen Yan , Arindam Banerjee , Jingrui He

We study the corrupted bandit problem, i.e. a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with $k$ unknown reward distributions, which are heavy-tailed and corrupted by a history-independent adversary or Nature. To be specific, the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-22 Debabrota Basu , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Timothée Mathieu

We introduce a stochastic contextual bandit model where at each time step the environment chooses a distribution over a context set and samples the context from this distribution. The learner observes only the context distribution while the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-15 Johannes Kirschner , Andreas Krause

The contextual bandit framework is widely used to solve sequential optimization problems where the reward of each decision depends on auxiliary context variables. In settings such as medicine, business, and engineering, the decision maker…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-17 Kevin Li , Eric Laber

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

We present a new algorithm for the contextual bandit learning problem, where the learner repeatedly takes one of $K$ actions in response to the observed context, and observes the reward only for that chosen action. Our method assumes access…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-10-15 Alekh Agarwal , Daniel Hsu , Satyen Kale , John Langford , Lihong Li , Robert E. Schapire

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

We consider Contextual Bandits with Concave Rewards (CBCR), a multi-objective bandit problem where the desired trade-off between the rewards is defined by a known concave objective function, and the reward vector depends on an observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Virginie Do , Elvis Dohmatob , Matteo Pirotta , Alessandro Lazaric , Nicolas Usunier

In this paper, we address the stochastic contextual linear bandit problem, where a decision maker is provided a context (a random set of actions drawn from a distribution). The expected reward of each action is specified by the inner…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-30 Osama A. Hanna , Lin F. Yang , Christina Fragouli

Contextual multi-armed bandits provide powerful tools to solve the exploitation-exploration dilemma in decision making, with direct applications in the personalized recommendation. In fact, collaborative effects among users carry the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Yikun Ban , Yunzhe Qi , Tianxin Wei , Jingrui He