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Boltzmann exploration is a classic strategy for sequential decision-making under uncertainty, and is one of the most standard tools in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Despite its widespread use, there is virtually no theoretical understanding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Claudio Gentile , Gábor Lugosi , Gergely Neu

We study the Combinatorial Thompson Sampling policy (CTS) for combinatorial multi-armed bandit problems (CMAB), within an approximation regret setting. Although CTS has attracted a lot of interest, it has a drawback that other usual CMAB…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-23 Pierre Perrault

Pure exploration is one of the fundamental problems in multi-armed bandits (MAB). However, existing works mostly focus on specific pure exploration tasks, without a holistic view of the general pure exploration problem. This work fills this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-12 Di Wu , Chengshuai Shi , Ruida Zhou , Cong Shen

We present a modified tuning of the algorithm of Zimmert and Seldin [2020] for adversarial multiarmed bandits with delayed feedback, which in addition to the minimax optimal adversarial regret guarantee shown by Zimmert and Seldin…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-01 Saeed Masoudian , Julian Zimmert , Yevgeny Seldin

We study a sequential decision problem where the learner faces a sequence of $K$-armed bandit tasks. The task boundaries might be known (the bandit meta-learning setting), or unknown (the non-stationary bandit setting). For a given integer…

We study a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where an agent is granted a free exploration budget before regret accumulates, a setting not captured by the classic regret minimization or pure exploration paradigms. The goal is to design…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Yunlong Hou , Zixin Zhong , Vincent Y. F. Tan

Bandit based methods for tree search have recently gained popularity when applied to huge trees, e.g. in the game of go [6]. Their efficient exploration of the tree enables to re- turn rapidly a good value, and improve preci- sion if more…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-08-12 Pierre-Arnuad Coquelin , Remi Munos

For the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem from a constrained model that generalizes the classical one, we show that an asymptotic optimality is achievable by a simple strategy extended from the $\epsilon_t$-greedy strategy. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-05-04 Hyeong Soo Chang

This paper introduces the framework of multi-armed sampling, which serves as the sampling counterpart to the optimization problem of multi-armed bandits. Our primary motivation is to rigorously examine the exploration-exploitation trade-off…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Mohammad Pedramfar , Siamak Ravanbakhsh

In many sequential decision-making problems, the individuals are split into several batches and the decision-maker is only allowed to change her policy at the end of batches. These batch problems have a large number of applications, ranging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Quanquan Gu , Amin Karbasi , Khashayar Khosravi , Vahab Mirrokni , Dongruo Zhou

Individual decision-makers consume information revealed by the previous decision makers, and produce information that may help in future decisions. This phenomenon is common in a wide range of scenarios in the Internet economy, as well as…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-05-06 Yishay Mansour , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Vasilis Syrgkanis

We consider the bandit problem of selecting $K$ out of $N$ arms at each time step. The reward can be a non-linear function of the rewards of the selected individual arms. The direct use of a multi-armed bandit algorithm requires choosing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal , Christopher J. Quinn , Abhishek Umrawal

In this paper, we provide the first investigation into adaptive combinatorial experimental design, focusing on the trade-off between regret minimization and statistical power in combinatorial multi-armed bandits (CMAB). While minimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Hongrui Xie , Junyu Cao , Kan Xu

We study an online mixed discrete and continuous optimization problem where a decision maker interacts with an unknown environment for a number of $T$ rounds. At each round, the decision maker needs to first jointly choose a discrete and a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-27 Lintao Ye , Ming Chi , Zhi-Wei Liu , Xiaoling Wang , Vijay Gupta

Combinatorial bandits extend the classical bandit framework to settings where the learner selects multiple arms in each round, motivated by applications such as online recommendation and assortment optimization. While extensions of upper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Yuxiao Wen , Yanjun Han , Zhengyuan Zhou

We study the constrained variant of the \emph{multi-armed bandit} (MAB) problem, in which the learner aims not only at minimizing the total loss incurred during the learning dynamic, but also at controlling the violation of multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Francesco Emanuele Stradi , Kalana Kalupahana , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

The multi-armed bandit(MAB) is a classical sequential decision problem. Most work requires assumptions about the reward distribution (e.g., bounded), while practitioners may have difficulty obtaining information about these distributions to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Han Qi , Fei Guo , Li Zhu

In pure exploration problems, a statistician sequentially collects information to answer a question about some stochastic and unknown environment. The probability of returning a wrong answer should not exceed a maximum risk parameter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Riccardo Poiani , Martino Bernasconi , Andrea Celli

We consider the trade-off problem between exploration and exploitation under finite discounted Markov Decision Process, where the state transition matrix of the underlying environment stays unknown. We propose a double Thompson sampling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Shuqing Shi , Xiaobin Wang , Zhiyou Yang , Fan Zhang , Hong Qu

In multi-armed bandit problems, the typical goal is to identify the arm with the highest reward. This paper explores a threshold-based bandit problem, aiming to select an arm based on its relation to a prescribed threshold \(\tau \). We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Chanakya Varude , Jay Chaudhary , Siddharth Kaushik , Prasanna Chaporkar