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Related papers: Differentiable Bandit Exploration

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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 the Max $K$-Armed Bandit problem, where a learning agent is faced with several stochastic arms, each a source of i.i.d. rewards of unknown distribution. At each time step the agent chooses an arm, and observes the reward of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-12-25 Yahel David , Nahum Shimkin

We study the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem in the presence of side-observations across actions that occur as a result of an underlying network structure. In our model, a bipartite graph captures the relationship between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-14 Swapna Buccapatnam , Fang Liu , Atilla Eryilmaz , Ness B. Shroff

We study the piecewise constant bandit problem where the expected reward is a piecewise constant function with one change point (discontinuity) across the action space $[0,1]$ and the learner's aim is to locate the change point. Under the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-23 Joseph Lazzaro , Ciara Pike-Burke

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

Online decision-making can be formulated as the popular stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where a learner makes decisions (or takes actions) to maximize cumulative rewards collected from an unknown environment. This paper proposes to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-26 Jonathan Gornet , Mehdi Hosseinzadeh , Bruno Sinopoli

Contextual bandit learning is a reinforcement learning problem where the learner repeatedly receives a set of features (context), takes an action and receives a reward based on the action and context. We consider this problem under a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-05 Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudík , Satyen Kale , John Langford , Robert E. Schapire

We study risk-aware offline policy learning, aiming to learn a decision rule from logged data that is optimal under general risk criteria. This problem is crucial in high-stakes domains where online interaction is infeasible and adverse…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-18 Yilong Wan , Yuqiang Li , Xianyi Wu

Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving many real-world interactive machine learning problems. Despite multiple recent successes on statistically and computationally efficient methods, the practical behavior of these…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-08 Alberto Bietti , Alekh Agarwal , John Langford

For a real-world decision-making problem, the reward function often needs to be engineered or learned. A popular approach is to utilize human feedback to learn a reward function for training. The most straightforward way to do so is to ask…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Xiang Ji , Huazheng Wang , Minshuo Chen , Tuo Zhao , Mengdi Wang

The Knowledge Gradient (KG) policy was originally proposed for online ranking and selection problems but has recently been adapted for use in online decision making in general and multi-armed bandit problems (MABs) in particular. We study…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-04-07 James Edwards , Paul Fearnhead , Kevin Glazebrook

We consider the problem where M agents collaboratively interact with an instance of a stochastic K-armed contextual bandit, where K>>M. The goal of the agents is to simultaneously minimize the cumulative regret over all the agents over a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-16 Jiabin Lin , Shana Moothedath

In this paper, we present refined probabilistic bounds on empirical reward estimates for off-policy learning in bandit problems. We build on the PAC-Bayesian bounds from Seldin et al. (2010) and improve on their results using a new…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-18 Amaury Gouverneur , Tobias J. Oechtering , Mikael Skoglund

In this work, we initiate the idea of using denoising diffusion models to learn priors for online decision making problems. Our special focus is on the meta-learning for bandit framework, with the goal of learning a strategy that performs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Yu-Guan Hsieh , Shiva Prasad Kasiviswanathan , Branislav Kveton , Patrick Blöbaum

Psychological research shows that enjoyment of many goods is subject to satiation, with short-term satisfaction declining after repeated exposures to the same item. Nevertheless, proposed algorithms for powering recommender systems seldom…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Liu Leqi , Fatma Kilinc-Karzan , Zachary C. Lipton , Alan L. Montgomery

In this paper, we study the non-asymptotic sample complexity for the pure exploration problem in contextual bandits and tabular reinforcement learning (RL): identifying an epsilon-optimal policy from a set of policies with high probability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Adhyyan Narang , Andrew Wagenmaker , Lillian Ratliff , Kevin Jamieson

In this report, we survey Bayesian Optimization methods focussed on the Multi-Armed Bandit Problem. We take the help of the paper "Portfolio Allocation for Bayesian Optimization". We report a small literature survey on the acquisition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-16 Abhilash Nandy , Chandan Kumar , Deepak Mewada , Soumya Sharma

We consider bandit problems involving a large (possibly infinite) collection of arms, in which the expected reward of each arm is a linear function of an $r$-dimensional random vector $\mathbf{Z} \in \mathbb{R}^r$, where $r \geq 2$. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2010-02-24 Paat Rusmevichientong , John N. Tsitsiklis

Multi-armed bandits are a quintessential machine learning problem requiring the balancing of exploration and exploitation. While there has been progress in developing algorithms with strong theoretical guarantees, there has been less focus…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-18 Bence Cserna , Marek Petrik , Reazul Hasan Russel , Wheeler Ruml

Sequential experiments are often characterized by an exploration-exploitation tradeoff that is captured by the multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework. This framework has been studied and applied, typically when at each time period feedback is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-22 Yonatan Gur , Ahmadreza Momeni