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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

As an extension of the classical multi-armed bandit problem, multi-fidelity multi-armed bandits (MF-MAB) enable individual arms to be evaluated using diverse feedback sources that vary in both cost and accuracy. Prior stochastic models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Muyun Lu , Haoyang Hong , Huazheng Wang , Ying Lin

Recently multi-armed bandit problem arises in many real-life scenarios where arms must be sampled in batches, due to limited time the agent can wait for the feedback. Such applications include biological experimentation and online…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-22 Shengyu Cao , Simai He , Ruoqing Jiang , Jin Xu , Hongsong Yuan

The best arm identification problem in the multi-armed bandit setting is an excellent model of many real-world decision-making problems, yet it fails to capture the fact that in the real-world, safety constraints often must be met while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-25 Zhenlin Wang , Andrew Wagenmaker , Kevin Jamieson

We study a multi-armed bandit problem with covariates in a setting where there is a possible delay in observing the rewards. Under some mild assumptions on the probability distributions for the delays and using an appropriate randomization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-06 Sakshi Arya , Yuhong Yang

Conducting randomized experiments in education settings raises the question of how we can use machine learning techniques to improve educational interventions. Using Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) algorithms like Thompson Sampling (TS) in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-11 Fernando J. Yanez , Angela Zavaleta-Bernuy , Ziwen Han , Michael Liut , Anna Rafferty , Joseph Jay Williams

We study the minimax sample complexity of $\varepsilon$-best arm identification in linear bandits. Given a compact action set $\mathcal{X}$ that spans $\mathbb{R}^d$ and an unknown reward vector $\theta\in\mathbb{R}^d$, the goal is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Arnab Maiti , Yunbei Xu , Kevin Jamieson

The multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a classical online optimization model for the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. The traditional MAB is concerned with finding the arm that minimizes the mean cost. However, minimizing the mean…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-09-17 Jianyu Xu , William B. Haskell , Zhisheng Ye

In the infinite-armed bandit problem, each arm's average reward is sampled from an unknown distribution, and each arm can be sampled further to obtain noisy estimates of the average reward of that arm. Prior work focuses on identifying the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Yifei Wang , Tavor Baharav , Yanjun Han , Jiantao Jiao , David Tse

In this paper, we investigate a largely extended version of classical MAB problem, called networked combinatorial bandit problems. In particular, we consider the setting of a decision maker over a networked bandits as follows: each time a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-23 Shaojie Tang , Yaqin Zhou

We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting where reward must be actively queried for it to be observed. We provide tight lower and upper problem-dependent guarantees on both the regret and the number of queries. Interestingly, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Nadav Merlis , Yonathan Efroni , Shie Mannor

One of the key drivers of complexity in the classical (stochastic) multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is the difference between mean rewards in the top two arms, also known as the instance gap. The celebrated Upper Confidence Bound (UCB)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Anand Kalvit , Assaf Zeevi

A standard assumption adopted in the multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework is that the mean rewards are constant over time. This assumption can be restrictive in the business world as decision-makers often face an evolving environment where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Ningyuan Chen , Chun Wang , Longlin Wang

We consider a variant of the best arm identification task in stochastic multi-armed bandits. Motivated by risk-averse decision-making problems, our goal is to identify a set of $m$ arms with the highest $\tau$-quantile values within a fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Mengyan Zhang , Cheng Soon Ong

Recommender systems relying on contextual multi-armed bandits continuously improve relevant item recommendations by taking into account the contextual information. The objective of bandit algorithms is to learn the best arm (e.g., best item…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Ahmed Sayeed Faruk , Elena Zheleva

In this paper we consider the contextual multi-armed bandit problem for linear payoffs under a risk-averse criterion. At each round, contexts are revealed for each arm, and the decision maker chooses one arm to pull and receives the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Yifan Lin , Yuhao Wang , Enlu Zhou

The stochastic multi-armed bandit model is a simple abstraction that has proven useful in many different contexts in statistics and machine learning. Whereas the achievable limit in terms of regret minimization is now well known, our aim is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-11-15 Emilie Kaufmann , Olivier Cappé , Aurélien Garivier

In several applications such as clinical trials and financial portfolio optimization, the expected value (or the average reward) does not satisfactorily capture the merits of a drug or a portfolio. In such applications, risk plays a crucial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-05-13 Vincent Y. F. Tan , Prashanth L. A. , Krishna Jagannathan

Stochastic multi-agent multi-armed bandits typically assume that the rewards from each arm follow a fixed distribution, regardless of which agent pulls the arm. However, in many real-world settings, rewards can depend on the sensitivity of…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Lucia Gordon , Esther Rolf , Milind Tambe

We propose a generalization of the best arm identification problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB) to the setting where every pull of an arm is associated with delayed feedback. The delay in feedback increases the effective sample…