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Related papers: Continuum-Armed Bandits: A Function Space Perspect…

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We consider the stochastic and adversarial settings of continuum armed bandits where the arms are indexed by [0,1]^d. The reward functions r:[0,1]^d -> R are assumed to intrinsically depend on at most k coordinate variables implying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-08-25 Hemant Tyagi , Bernd Gärtner

In this paper, we make the key delineation on the roles of resolution and statistical uncertainty in hierarchical bandits-based black-box optimization algorithms, guiding a more general analysis and a more efficient algorithm design. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-01 Wenjie Li , Chi-Hua Wang , Guang Cheng , Qifan Song

I introduce and analyse an anytime version of the Optimally Confident UCB (OCUCB) algorithm designed for minimising the cumulative regret in finite-armed stochastic bandits with subgaussian noise. The new algorithm is simple, intuitive (in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-09 Tor Lattimore

Motivated by dynamic parameter optimization in finite, but large action (configurations) spaces, this work studies the nonstochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem in metric action spaces with oblivious Lipschitz adversaries. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Chen Avin , Zvi Lotker , Shie Mannor , Gil Shabat , Hanan Shteingart , Roey Yadgar

This paper studies a bandit optimization problem where the goal is to maximize a function $f(x)$ over $T$ periods for some unknown strongly concave function $f$. We consider a new pairwise comparison oracle, where the decision-maker chooses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Xiangyu Chang , Xi Chen , Yining Wang , Zhiyi Zeng

We study the problem of stochastic contextual bandits in the agnostic setting, where the goal is to compete with the best policy in a given class without assuming realizability or imposing model restrictions on losses or rewards. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-06 Samuel Girard , Aurelien Bibaut , Arthur Gretton , Nathan Kallus , Houssam Zenati

We consider online convex optimization with a zero-order oracle feedback. In particular, the decision maker does not know the explicit representation of the time-varying cost functions, or their gradients. At each time step, she observes…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-05-05 Tatiana Tatarenko , Maryam Kamgarpour

The Gaussian process bandit is a problem in which we want to find a maximizer of a black-box function with the minimum number of function evaluations. If the black-box function varies with time, then time-varying Bayesian optimization is a…

Contextual bandits are widely-used in the study of learning-based control policies for finite action spaces. While the problem is well-studied for bandits with perfectly observed context vectors, little is known about the case of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-03 Hongju Park , Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh

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

In this paper, we consider the problem of black box continuous submodular maximization where we only have access to the function values and no information about the derivatives is provided. For a monotone and continuous DR-submodular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Lin Chen , Mingrui Zhang , Hamed Hassani , Amin Karbasi

We study the $K$-armed contextual dueling bandit problem, a sequential decision making setting in which the learner uses contextual information to make two decisions, but only observes \emph{preference-based feedback} suggesting that one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-25 Aadirupa Saha , Akshay Krishnamurthy

Many real-world functions are defined over both categorical and category-specific continuous variables and thus cannot be optimized by traditional Bayesian optimization (BO) methods. To optimize such functions, we propose a new method that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-02 Dang Nguyen , Sunil Gupta , Santu Rana , Alistair Shilton , Svetha Venkatesh

We consider a contextual version of multi-armed bandit problem with global knapsack constraints. In each round, the outcome of pulling an arm is a scalar reward and a resource consumption vector, both dependent on the context, and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-07-12 Shipra Agrawal , Nikhil R. Devanur , Lihong Li

We consider a multi-armed bandit problem where payoffs are a linear function of an observed stochastic contextual variable. In the scenario where there exists a gap between optimal and suboptimal rewards, several algorithms have been…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2014-07-08 José Bento , Stratis Ioannidis , S. Muthukrishnan , Jinyun Yan

We consider the problem of optimizing a grey-box objective function, i.e., nested function composed of both black-box and white-box functions. A general formulation for such grey-box problems is given, which covers the existing grey-box…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-03 Wenjie Xu , Yuning Jiang , Bratislav Svetozarevic , Colin N. Jones

We present the first high-probability optimal regret bound for a policy optimization technique applied to the problem of stochastic contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) with general offline function approximation. Our algorithm is both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Orin Levy , Yishay Mansour

We investigate the convergence properties of a class of iterative algorithms designed to minimize a potentially non-smooth and noisy objective function, which may be algebraically intractable and whose values may be obtained as the output…

Computation · Statistics 2025-12-04 Christophe Andrieu , Nicolas Chopin , Ettore Fincato , Mathieu Gerber

In this work, we develop linear bandit algorithms that automatically adapt to different environments. By plugging a novel loss estimator into the optimization problem that characterizes the instance-optimal strategy, our first algorithm not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Chung-Wei Lee , Haipeng Luo , Chen-Yu Wei , Mengxiao Zhang , Xiaojin Zhang

Bandit optimization usually refers to the class of online optimization problems with limited feedback, namely, a decision maker uses only the objective value at the current point to make a new decision and does not have access to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Yuriy Dorn , Aleksandr Katrutsa , Ilgam Latypov , Anastasiia Soboleva