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The dueling bandits problem is an online learning framework for learning from pairwise preference feedback, and is particularly well-suited for modeling settings that elicit subjective or implicit human feedback. In this paper, we study the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-02 Yanan Sui , Vincent Zhuang , Joel W. Burdick , Yisong Yue

Bandit structured prediction describes a stochastic optimization framework where learning is performed from partial feedback. This feedback is received in the form of a task loss evaluation to a predicted output structure, without having…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-14 Julia Kreutzer , Artem Sokolov , Stefan Riezler

We address the problem of online sequential decision making, i.e., balancing the trade-off between exploiting the current knowledge to maximize immediate performance and exploring the new information to gain long-term benefits using the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Kartik Anand Pant , Amod Hegde , K. V. Srinivas

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…

We study finite-armed stochastic bandits where the rewards of each arm might be correlated to those of other arms. We introduce a novel phased algorithm that exploits the given structure to build confidence sets over the parameters of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Andrea Tirinzoni , Alessandro Lazaric , Marcello Restelli

In algorithm optimization in reinforcement learning, how to deal with the exploration-exploitation dilemma is particularly important. Multi-armed bandit problem can optimize the proposed solutions by changing the reward distribution to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-28 Zhendong Shi , Ercan E. Kuruoglu , Xiaoli Wei

Recommender systems should adapt to user interests as the latter evolve. A prevalent cause for the evolution of user interests is the influence of their social circle. In general, when the interests are not known, online algorithms that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Silviu Maniu , Stratis Ioannidis , Bogdan Cautis

A latent bandit problem is one in which the learning agent knows the arm reward distributions conditioned on an unknown discrete latent state. The primary goal of the agent is to identify the latent state, after which it can act optimally.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-17 Joey Hong , Branislav Kveton , Manzil Zaheer , Yinlam Chow , Amr Ahmed , Craig Boutilier

We propose a new framework for contextual multi-armed bandits based on tree ensembles. Our framework adapts two widely used bandit methods, Upper Confidence Bound and Thompson Sampling, for both standard and combinatorial settings. As part…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Hannes Nilsson , Rikard Johansson , Niklas Åkerblom , Morteza Haghir Chehreghani

Many interventions, such as vaccines in clinical trials or coupons in online marketplaces, must be assigned sequentially without full knowledge of their effects. Multi-armed bandit algorithms have proven successful in such settings.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-07 Aidan Gleich , Eric Laber , Alexander Volfovsky

Thompson Sampling provides an efficient technique to introduce prior knowledge in the multi-armed bandit problem, along with providing remarkable empirical performance. In this paper, we revisit the Thompson Sampling algorithm under rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-09 Abhimanyu Dubey , Alex Pentland

We study the problem of meta-learning several contextual stochastic bandits tasks by leveraging their concentration around a low-dimensional affine subspace, which we learn via online principal component analysis to reduce the expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Steven Bilaj , Sofien Dhouib , Setareh Maghsudi

Users of recommender systems often behave in a non-stationary fashion, due to their evolving preferences and tastes over time. In this work, we propose a practical approach for fast personalization to non-stationary users. The key idea is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Joey Hong , Branislav Kveton , Manzil Zaheer , Yinlam Chow , Amr Ahmed , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Craig Boutilier

How to explore efficiently is a central problem in multi-armed bandits. In this paper, we introduce the metadata-based multi-task bandit problem, where the agent needs to solve a large number of related multi-armed bandit tasks and can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-17 Runzhe Wan , Lin Ge , Rui Song

Non-stationarity is ubiquitous in human behavior and addressing it in the contextual bandits is challenging. Several works have addressed the problem by investigating semi-parametric contextual bandits and warned that ignoring…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-05-18 Young-Geun Choi , Gi-Soo Kim , Seunghoon Paik , Myunghee Cho Paik

We study learning to learn for the multi-task structured bandit problem where the goal is to learn a near-optimal algorithm that minimizes cumulative regret. The tasks share a common structure and an algorithm should exploit the shared…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Josiah P. Hanna , Qiaomin Xie , Robert Nowak

Bandit is a framework for designing sequential experiments. In each experiment, a learner selects an arm $A \in \mathcal{A}$ and obtains an observation corresponding to $A$. Theoretically, the tight regret lower-bound for the general bandit…

Much of the recent literature on bandit learning focuses on algorithms that aim to converge on an optimal action. One shortcoming is that this orientation does not account for time sensitivity, which can play a crucial role when learning an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-09 Daniel Russo , Benjamin Van Roy

Intelligent agents equipped with causal knowledge can optimize their action spaces to avoid unnecessary exploration. The structural causal bandit framework provides a graphical characterization for identifying actions that are unable to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Min Woo Park , Sanghack Lee

We study a structured variant of the multi-armed bandit problem specified by a set of Bernoulli distributions $ \nu \!= \!(\nu\_{a,b})\_{a \in \mathcal{A}, b \in \mathcal{B}}$ with means $(\mu\_{a,b})\_{a \in \mathcal{A}, b \in…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-07-13 Hassan Saber , Pierre Ménard , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard