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This work addresses learning online fair division under uncertainty, where a central planner sequentially allocates items without precise knowledge of agents' values or utilities. Departing from conventional online algorithm, the planner…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Hakuei Yamada , Junpei Komiyama , Kenshi Abe , Atsushi Iwasaki

We consider the contextual bandit problem on general action and context spaces, where the learner's rewards depend on their selected actions and an observable context. This generalizes the standard multi-armed bandit to the case where side…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-03 Moise Blanchard , Steve Hanneke , Patrick Jaillet

Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving many real-world interactive machine learning problems. Despite multiple recent successes on statistically and computationally efficient methods, the practical behavior of these…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-08 Alberto Bietti , Alekh Agarwal , John Langford

We study contextual bandits in the presence of a stage-wise constraint when the constraint must be satisfied both with high probability and in expectation. We start with the linear case where both the reward function and the stage-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Aldo Pacchiano , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Peter Bartlett

We investigate contextual bandits in the presence of side-observations across arms in order to design recommendation algorithms for users connected via social networks. Users in social networks respond to their friends' activity, and hence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Rahul Singh , Fang Liu , Xin Liu , Ness Shroff

This paper studies model-based bandit and reinforcement learning (RL) with nonlinear function approximations. We propose to study convergence to approximate local maxima because we show that global convergence is statistically intractable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-04 Kefan Dong , Jiaqi Yang , Tengyu Ma

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

In this paper, we introduce a new online decision making paradigm that we call Thresholding Graph Bandits. The main goal is to efficiently identify a subset of arms in a multi-armed bandit problem whose means are above a specified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-26 Daniel LeJeune , Gautam Dasarathy , Richard G. Baraniuk

In this paper, we study the multi-objective bandits (MOB) problem, where a learner repeatedly selects one arm to play and then receives a reward vector consisting of multiple objectives. MOB has found many real-world applications as varied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Shiyin Lu , Guanghui Wang , Yao Hu , Lijun Zhang

Motivated by emerging applications such as live-streaming e-commerce, promotions and recommendations, we introduce and solve a general class of non-stationary multi-armed bandit problems that have the following two features: (i) the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-12-23 David Simchi-Levi , Zeyu Zheng , Feng Zhu

This paper introduces a novel multi-armed bandits framework, termed Contextual Restless Bandits (CRB), for complex online decision-making. This CRB framework incorporates the core features of contextual bandits and restless bandits, so that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Xin Chen , I-Hong Hou

In this paper we consider the contextual multi-armed bandit problem for linear payoffs under a risk-averse criterion. At each round, contexts are revealed for each arm, and the decision maker chooses one arm to pull and receives the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Yifan Lin , Yuhao Wang , Enlu Zhou

In restless bandits, a central agent is tasked with optimally distributing limited resources across several bandits (arms), with each arm being a Markov decision process. In this work, we generalize the traditional restless bandits problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Nima Akbarzadeh , Yossiri Adulyasak , Erick Delage

Offline contextual bandits allow one to learn policies from historical/offline data without requiring online interaction. However, offline policy optimization that maximizes overall expected rewards can unintentionally amplify the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Yihong Guo , Junjie Luo , Guodong Gao , Ritu Agarwal , Anqi Liu

As bandit algorithms are increasingly utilized in scientific studies and industrial applications, there is an associated increasing need for reliable inference methods based on the resulting adaptively-collected data. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-12 Kelly W. Zhang , Lucas Janson , Susan A. Murphy

Contextual bandit algorithms have transformed modern experimentation by enabling real-time adaptation for personalized treatment and efficient use of data. Yet these advantages create challenges for statistical inference due to adaptivity.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-09-23 Yongyi Guo , Ziping Xu

We study a resource allocation problem with varying requests, and with resources of limited capacity shared by multiple requests. It is modeled as a set of heterogeneous Restless Multi-Armed Bandit Problems (RMABPs) connected by constraints…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-03-30 Jing Fu , Bill Moran , Peter G. Taylor

In many modern settings, data are acquired iteratively over time, rather than all at once. Such settings are known as online, as opposed to offline or batch. We introduce a simple technique for online parameter estimation, which can operate…

Computation · Statistics 2017-03-22 Hien D Nguyen

Bandit algorithms are increasingly used in real-world sequential decision-making problems. Associated with this is an increased desire to be able to use the resulting datasets to answer scientific questions like: Did one type of ad lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Kelly W. Zhang , Lucas Janson , Susan A. Murphy

Many recent developments in the high-dimensional statistical time series literature have centered around time-dependent applications that can be adapted to regularized least squares. Of particular interest is the lasso, which both serves to…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-10-16 William B. Nicholson , Xiaohan Yan