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Related papers: Multiscale Non-stationary Stochastic Bandits

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Real-world applications of contextual bandits often exhibit non-stationarity due to seasonality, serendipity, and evolving social trends. While a number of non-stationary contextual bandit learning algorithms have been proposed in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Zheqing Zhu , Yueyang Liu , Xu Kuang , Benjamin Van Roy

Contextual bandits are a rich model for sequential decision making given side information, with important applications, e.g., in recommender systems. We propose novel algorithms for contextual bandits harnessing neural networks to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-01 Parnian Kassraie , Andreas Krause

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

While classical formulations of multi-armed bandit problems assume that each arm's reward is independent and stationary, real-world applications often involve non-stationary environments and interdependencies between arms. In particular,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Ryoma Sato , Shinji Ito

Safety is a desirable property that can immensely increase the applicability of learning algorithms in real-world decision-making problems. It is much easier for a company to deploy an algorithm that is safe, i.e., guaranteed to perform at…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-07 Abbas Kazerouni , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Benjamin Van Roy

We consider the problem of online learning in misspecified linear stochastic multi-armed bandit problems. Regret guarantees for state-of-the-art linear bandit algorithms such as Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty Linear bandit (OFUL) hold…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-25 Avishek Ghosh , Sayak Ray Chowdhury , Aditya Gopalan

Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the strategy deployed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. Further, often we have only partial information on the state of the system. We study the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Jiabin Lin , Xian Yeow Lee , Talukder Jubery , Shana Moothedath , Soumik Sarkar , Baskar Ganapathysubramanian

We study the problem of worst case regret in piecewise stationary multi armed bandits. While the minimax theory for stationary bandits is well established, understanding analogous limits in time-varying settings is challenging. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Gal Mendelson , Eyal Tadmor

In many fields such as digital marketing, healthcare, finance, and robotics, it is common to have a well-tested and reliable baseline policy running in production (e.g., a recommender system). Nonetheless, the baseline policy is often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-11 Evrard Garcelon , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Alessandro Lazaric , Matteo Pirotta

We study the dynamic regret of multi-armed bandit and experts problem in non-stationary stochastic environments. We introduce a new parameter $\Lambda$, which measures the total statistical variance of the loss distributions over $T$ rounds…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-24 Chen-Yu Wei , Yi-Te Hong , Chi-Jen Lu

This paper considers a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem in which multiple mobile agents receive rewards by sampling from a collection of spatially dispersed stochastic processes, called bandits. The goal is to formulate a decentralized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-01 Pathmanathan Pankayaraj , D. H. S. Maithripala , J. M. Berg

This paper investigates stochastic and adversarial combinatorial multi-armed bandit problems. In the stochastic setting under semi-bandit feedback, we derive a problem-specific regret lower bound, and discuss its scaling with the dimension…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-11-09 Richard Combes , M. Sadegh Talebi , Alexandre Proutiere , Marc Lelarge

Existing contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms fail to effectively capture both long-term trends and local patterns across all arms, leading to suboptimal performance in environments with rapidly changing reward structures. They…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-01 Hamed Khosravi , Mohammad Reza Shafie , Ahmed Shoyeb Raihan , Srinjoy Das , Imtiaz Ahmed

We consider a variant of the multi-armed bandit model, which we call multi-armed bandit problem with known trend, where the gambler knows the shape of the reward function of each arm but not its distribution. This new problem is motivated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-15 Djallel Bouneffouf , Raphaël Feraud

We consider minimisation of dynamic regret in non-stationary bandits with a slowly varying property. Namely, we assume that arms' rewards are stochastic and independent over time, but that the absolute difference between the expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Ramakrishnan Krishnamurthy , Aditya Gopalan

We study decentralized stochastic linear bandits, where a network of $N$ agents acts cooperatively to efficiently solve a linear bandit-optimization problem over a $d$-dimensional space. For this problem, we propose DLUCB: a fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Sanae Amani , Christos Thrampoulidis

Model misspecification is a major consideration in applications of statistical methods and machine learning. However, it is often neglected in contextual bandits. This paper studies a common form of misspecification, an inter-arm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Rong Zhu , Branislav Kveton

Contextual multi-armed bandit algorithms are widely used in sequential decision tasks such as news article recommendation systems, web page ad placement algorithms, and mobile health. Most of the existing algorithms have regret proportional…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-14 Gi-Soo Kim , Myunghee Cho Paik

We study nonparametric contextual bandits where Lipschitz mean reward functions may change over time. We first establish the minimax dynamic regret rate in this less understood setting in terms of number of changes $L$ and total-variation…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-21 Joe Suk , Samory Kpotufe

This paper presents a finite-time analysis of the KL-UCB algorithm, an online, horizon-free index policy for stochastic bandit problems. We prove two distinct results: first, for arbitrary bounded rewards, the KL-UCB algorithm satisfies a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-08-30 Aurélien Garivier , Olivier Cappé