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This paper studies a bandit optimization problem where the goal is to maximize a function $f(x)$ over $T$ periods for some unknown strongly concave function $f$. We consider a new pairwise comparison oracle, where the decision-maker chooses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Xiangyu Chang , Xi Chen , Yining Wang , Zhiyi Zeng

This paper considers the use of a simple posterior sampling algorithm to balance between exploration and exploitation when learning to optimize actions such as in multi-armed bandit problems. The algorithm, also known as Thompson Sampling,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-04 Daniel Russo , Benjamin Van Roy

The exploration/exploitation (E/E) dilemma arises naturally in many subfields of Science. Multi-armed bandit problems formalize this dilemma in its canonical form. Most current research in this field focuses on generic solutions that can be…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-07-24 Francis Maes , Damien Ernst , Louis Wehenkel

We study a decentralized cooperative stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with $K$ arms on a network of $N$ agents. In our model, the reward distribution of each arm is the same for each agent and rewards are drawn independently across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-25 David Martínez-Rubio , Varun Kanade , Patrick Rebeschini

Motivated by distributed selection problems, we formulate a new variant of multi-player multi-armed bandit (MAB) model, which captures stochastic arrival of requests to each arm, as well as the policy of allocating requests to players. The…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Hong Xie , Jinyu Mo , Defu Lian , Jie Wang , Enhong Chen

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

This paper develops a fast numerical dual control for exploration and exploitation (DCEE) method to address auto-optimization problems in unknown environments. In auto-optimization problems, the optimal operating condition is unknown a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Shiying Dong , Haoyang Yang , Qiwei Liu , Wen-Hua Chen

Single-player contextual bandits are a well-studied problem in reinforcement learning that has seen applications in various fields such as advertising, healthcare, and finance. In light of the recent work on \emph{information asymmetric}…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-13 William Chang , Yuanhao Lu

We consider a large number of agents collaborating on a multi-armed bandit problem with a large number of arms. The goal is to minimise the regret of each agent in a communication-constrained setting. We present a decentralised algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Conor Newton , Ayalvadi Ganesh , Henry W. J. Reeve

A long line of works characterizes the sample complexity of regret minimization in sequential decision-making by min-max programs. In the corresponding saddle-point game, the min-player optimizes the sampling distribution against an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Johannes Kirschner , Seyed Alireza Bakhtiari , Kushagra Chandak , Volodymyr Tkachuk , Csaba Szepesvári

We study pure exploration with infinitely many bandit arms generated i.i.d. from an unknown distribution. Our goal is to efficiently select a single high quality arm whose average reward is, with probability $1-\delta$, within $\varepsilon$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Xiao-Yue Gong , Mark Sellke

The celebrated multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory models the basic trade-off between exploration, or learning about the state of a system, and exploitation, or utilizing the system. In this paper we study the variant of the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2013-06-19 Sudipto Guha , Kamesh Munagala

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 consider a general multi-armed bandit problem with correlated (and simple contextual and restless) elements, as a relaxed control problem. By introducing an entropy regularisation, we obtain a smooth asymptotic approximation to the value…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-07 Samuel N. Cohen , Tanut Treetanthiploet

We study stochastic linear optimization problem with bandit feedback. The set of arms take values in an $N$-dimensional space and belong to a bounded polyhedron described by finitely many linear inequalities. We provide a lower bound for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-09-29 Manjesh K. Hanawal , Amir Leshem , Venkatesh Saligrama

We study a generalization of the multi-armed bandit problem with multiple plays where there is a cost associated with pulling each arm and the agent has a budget at each time that dictates how much she can expect to spend. We derive an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-13 Alexander Luedtke , Emilie Kaufmann , Antoine Chambaz

In federated multi-armed bandit problems, maximizing global reward while satisfying minimum privacy requirements to protect clients is the main goal. To formulate such problems, we consider a combinatorial contextual bandit setting with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Sepehr Elahi , Baran Atalar , Sevda Öğüt , Cem Tekin

We introduce the bilinear bandit problem with low-rank structure in which an action takes the form of a pair of arms from two different entity types, and the reward is a bilinear function of the known feature vectors of the arms. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Kwang-Sung Jun , Rebecca Willett , Stephen Wright , Robert Nowak

In actor-critic-based reinforcement learning algorithms such as Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic policy gradient (TD3), insufficient exploration of the spatial space can result in suboptimal policies when controlling 7-DOF robotic arms. To…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Wen-Han Hsieh , Jen-Yuan Chang

We study the regret of Thompson sampling (TS) algorithms for exponential family bandits, where the reward distribution is from a one-dimensional exponential family, which covers many common reward distributions including Bernoulli,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-09 Tianyuan Jin , Pan Xu , Xiaokui Xiao , Anima Anandkumar