English
Related papers

Related papers: Greedy Algorithm almost Dominates in Smoothed Cont…

200 papers

The priority model was introduced to capture "greedy-like" algorithms. Motivated by the success of advice complexity in the area of online algorithms, the fixed priority model was extended to include advice, and a reduction-based framework…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-01-27 Joan Boyar , Kim S. Larsen , Denis Pankratov

Agents' learning from feedback shapes economic outcomes, and many economic decision-makers today employ learning algorithms to make consequential choices. This note shows that a widely used learning algorithm, $\varepsilon$-Greedy, exhibits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Andreas Haupt , Aroon Narayanan

Most exploration algorithms search broadly until uncertainty is resolved. When the action space is too large to resolve within budget, practitioners default to $\varepsilon$-greedy, which bounds disruption but spends its override blindly.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Ian Osband

We study the problem of learning 'good' interventions in a stochastic environment modeled by its underlying causal graph. Good interventions refer to interventions that maximize rewards. Specifically, we consider the setting of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Fateme Jamshidi , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash

We study incentivized exploration in multi-armed bandit (MAB) settings with infinitely many arms modeled as elements in continuous metric spaces. Unlike classical bandit models, we consider scenarios where the decision-maker (principal)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Sourav Chakraborty , Amit Kiran Rege , Claire Monteleoni , Lijun Chen

In many platforms, user arrivals exhibit a self-reinforcing behavior: future user arrivals are likely to have preferences similar to users who were satisfied in the past. In other words, arrivals exhibit positive externalities. We study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-08 Virag Shah , Jose Blanchet , Ramesh Johari

We address online learning in complex auction settings, such as sponsored search auctions, where the value of the bidder is unknown to her, evolving in an arbitrary manner and observed only if the bidder wins an allocation. We leverage the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-06-04 Zhe Feng , Chara Podimata , Vasilis Syrgkanis

Efficient exploration in bandits is a fundamental online learning problem. We propose a variant of Thompson sampling that learns to explore better as it interacts with bandit instances drawn from an unknown prior. The algorithm meta-learns…

Greedy algorithms are a fundamental category of algorithms in mathematics and computer science, characterized by their iterative, locally optimal decision-making approach, which aims to find global optima. In this review, we will discuss…

Functional Analysis · Mathematics 2024-12-09 Andrea García

Multi-armed bandit algorithms have become a reference solution for handling the explore/exploit dilemma in recommender systems, and many other important real-world problems, such as display advertisement. However, such algorithms usually…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-25 Qingyun Wu , Naveen Iyer , Hongning Wang

We study a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, where at each time step, the player observes an independently sampled context that determines the arms' mean rewards. However, playing an arm blocks it (across all contexts) for a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Soumya Basu , Orestis Papadigenopoulos , Constantine Caramanis , Sanjay Shakkottai

The exploration/exploitation (E&E) dilemma lies at the core of interactive systems such as online advertising, for which contextual bandit algorithms have been proposed. Bayesian approaches provide guided exploration with principled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Feiyang Pan , Haoming Li , Xiang Ao , Wei Wang , Yanrong Kang , Ao Tan , Qing He

The multi objective bandit setting has traditionally been regarded as more complex than the single objective case, as multiple objectives must be optimized simultaneously. In contrast to this prevailing view, we demonstrate that when…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-16 Heesang Ann , Min-hwan Oh

We study the Bayesian regret of the renowned Thompson Sampling algorithm in contextual bandits with binary losses and adversarially-selected contexts. We adapt the information-theoretic perspective of \cite{RvR16} to the contextual setting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Gergely Neu , Julia Olkhovskaya , Matteo Papini , Ludovic Schwartz

Submodular maximization has been widely studied over the past decades, mostly because of its numerous applications in real-world problems. It is well known that the standard greedy algorithm guarantees a worst-case approximation factor of…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-02-12 Alfredo Torrico , Mohit Singh , Sebastian Pokutta

We provide theoretical bounds on the worst case performance of the greedy algorithm in seeking to maximize a normalized, monotone, but not necessarily submodular objective function under a simple partition matroid constraint. We also…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-10-19 Benjamin Biggs , James McMahon , Philip Baldoni , Daniel J. Stilwell

We propose an algorithmic framework, Offline Estimation to Decisions (OE2D), that reduces contextual bandit learning with general reward function approximation to offline regression. The framework allows near-optimal regret for contextual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Hao Qin , Chicheng Zhang

We study contextual linear bandit problems under feature uncertainty, where the features are noisy and have missing entries. To address the challenges posed by this noise, we analyze Bayesian oracles given the observed noisy features. Our…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Jung-hun Kim , Se-Young Yun , Minchan Jeong , Jun Hyun Nam , Jinwoo Shin , Richard Combes

We study the linear contextual bandit problem in the presence of adversarial corruption, where the reward at each round is corrupted by an adversary, and the corruption level (i.e., the sum of corruption magnitudes over the horizon) is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Tong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

The combinatorial pure exploration of causal bandits is the following online learning task: given a causal graph with unknown causal inference distributions, in each round we choose a subset of variables to intervene or do no intervention,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Nuoya Xiong , Wei Chen