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In many biomedical, science, and engineering problems, one must sequentially decide which action to take next so as to maximize rewards. One general class of algorithms for optimizing interactions with the world, while simultaneously…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-05 Iñigo Urteaga , Chris H. Wiggins

We consider the problem of contextual bandits where actions are subsets of a ground set and mean rewards are modeled by an unknown monotone submodular function that belongs to a class $\mathcal{F}$. We allow time-varying matroid constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Dean P. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin

We study contextual bandits with budget and time constraints, referred to as constrained contextual bandits.The time and budget constraints significantly complicate the exploration and exploitation tradeoff because they introduce complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-10-20 Huasen Wu , R. Srikant , Xin Liu , Chong Jiang

We study the contextual continuum bandits problem, where the learner sequentially receives a side information vector and has to choose an action in a convex set, minimizing a function associated with the context. The goal is to minimize all…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-28 Arya Akhavan , Karim Lounici , Massimiliano Pontil , Alexandre B. Tsybakov

We study nonparametric contextual bandits under batch constraints, where the expected reward for each action is modeled as a smooth function of covariates, and the policy updates are made at the end of each batch of observations. We…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-06 Rong Jiang , Cong Ma

Thanks to the power of representation learning, neural contextual bandit algorithms demonstrate remarkable performance improvement against their classical counterparts. But because their exploration has to be performed in the entire neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Yiling Jia , Weitong Zhang , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu , Hongning Wang

We study the non-stationary stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, where the reward statistics of each arm may change several times during the course of learning. The performance of a learning algorithm is evaluated in terms of their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-09 Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Andras Gyorgy , Nevena Lazic

A major challenge in contextual bandits is to design general-purpose algorithms that are both practically useful and theoretically well-founded. We present a new technique that has the empirical and computational advantages of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-06 Dylan J. Foster , Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudík , Haipeng Luo , Robert E. Schapire

We study linear contextual bandits with access to a large, confounded, offline dataset that was sampled from some fixed policy. We show that this problem is closely related to a variant of the bandit problem with side information. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-11 Guy Tennenholtz , Uri Shalit , Shie Mannor , Yonathan Efroni

We consider a novel variant of the contextual bandit problem (i.e., the multi-armed bandit with side-information, or context, available to a decision-maker) where the reward associated with each context-based decision may not always be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-21 Djallel Bouneffouf , Sohini Upadhyay , Yasaman Khazaeni

We address the problem of learning in an online, bandit setting where the learner must repeatedly select among $K$ actions, but only receives partial feedback based on its choices. We establish two new facts: First, using a new algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-10-28 Alina Beygelzimer , John Langford , Lihong Li , Lev Reyzin , Robert E. Schapire

We study how the regret guarantees of nonstochastic multi-armed bandits can be improved, if the effective range of the losses in each round is small (e.g. the maximal difference between two losses in a given round). Despite a recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-03 Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Ohad Shamir

Contextual bandit algorithms are at the core of many applications, including recommender systems, clinical trials, and optimal portfolio selection. One of the most popular problems studied in the contextual bandit literature is to maximize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Siddhant Chaudhary , Abhishek Sinha

We study constrained contextual bandits (CCB) with adversarially chosen contexts, where each action yields a random reward and incurs a random cost. We adopt the standard realizability assumption: conditioned on the observed context,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Dhruv Sarkar , Abhishek Sinha

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

We consider a novel variant of the contextual bandit problem (i.e., the multi-armed bandit with side-information, or context, available to a decision-maker) where the context used at each decision may be corrupted ("useless context"). This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Djallel Bouneffouf

We consider minimisation of dynamic regret in non-stationary bandits with a slowly varying property. Namely, we assume that arms' rewards are stochastic and independent over time, but that the absolute difference between the expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Ramakrishnan Krishnamurthy , Aditya Gopalan

We consider a stochastic bandit problem with infinitely many arms. In this setting, the learner has no chance of trying all the arms even once and has to dedicate its limited number of samples only to a certain number of arms. All previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-05-19 Alexandra Carpentier , Michal Valko

Modern systems, such as digital platforms and service systems, increasingly rely on contextual bandits for online decision-making; however, their deployment can inadvertently create unfair exposure among arms, undermining long-term platform…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-05 Qingwen Zhang , Wenjia Wang

In this work we consider adversarial contextual bandits with risk constraints. At each round, nature prepares a context, a cost for each arm, and additionally a risk for each arm. The learner leverages the context to pull an arm and then…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-18 Wen Sun , Debadeepta Dey , Ashish Kapoor