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Related papers: Regret Minimization in Heavy-Tailed Bandits

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Most bandit algorithm designs are purely theoretical. Therefore, they have strong regret guarantees, but also are often too conservative in practice. In this work, we pioneer the idea of algorithm design by minimizing the empirical Bayes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-12 Chih-Wei Hsu , Branislav Kveton , Ofer Meshi , Martin Mladenov , Csaba Szepesvari

Multi-armed Bandit motivates methods with provable upper bounds on regret and also the counterpart lower bounds have been extensively studied in this context. Recently, Multi-agent Multi-armed Bandit has gained significant traction in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-17 Mengfan Xu , Diego Klabjan

We study a stochastic bandit algorithm motivated by retry-aware objectives that value the best outcome among multiple attempts, such as pass@$k$ and max@$k$. Given a posterior over arm values, ReMax chooses a sampling distribution that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Bingkui Tong , Junpei Komiyama , Soichiro Nishimori , Paavo Parmas

Much of the literature on optimal design of bandit algorithms is based on minimization of expected regret. It is well known that designs that are optimal over certain exponential families can achieve expected regret that grows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-14 Lin Fan , Peter W. Glynn

We consider model selection in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. Given a set of base learning algorithms, an effective model selection strategy adapts to the best learning algorithm in an online fashion. We show that by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Aldo Pacchiano , My Phan

In this paper, we propose a constant word (RAM model) algorithm for regret minimisation for both finite and infinite Stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) instances. Most of the existing regret minimisation algorithms need to remember the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-25 Arghya Roy Chaudhuri , Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan

We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting and study the problem of constrained regret minimization over a given time horizon. Each arm is associated with an unknown, possibly multi-dimensional distribution, and the merit of an arm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Anmol Kagrecha , Jayakrishnan Nair , Krishna Jagannathan

We study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem when one knows the value $\mu^{(\star)}$ of an optimal arm, as a well as a positive lower bound on the smallest positive gap $\Delta$. We propose a new randomized policy that attains a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-02-13 Sébastien Bubeck , Vianney Perchet , Philippe Rigollet

We study stochastic linear bandits with heavy-tailed rewards, where the rewards have a finite $(1+\epsilon)$-absolute central moment bounded by $\upsilon$ for some $\epsilon \in (0,1]$. We improve both upper and lower bounds on the minimax…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Artin Tajdini , Jonathan Scarlett , Kevin Jamieson

We consider a stochastic bandit problem with a possibly infinite number of arms. We write $p^*$ for the proportion of optimal arms and $\Delta$ for the minimal mean-gap between optimal and sub-optimal arms. We characterize the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-08 Rianne de Heide , James Cheshire , Pierre Ménard , Alexandra Carpentier

This paper is in the field of stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits (MABs), i.e. those sequential selection techniques able to learn online using only the feedback given by the chosen option (a.k.a. $arm$). We study a particular case of the rested…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-28 Marco Fiandri , Alberto Maria Metelli , Francesco Trov`o

The batched multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, in which rewards are collected in batches, is crucial for applications such as clinical trials. Existing research predominantly assumes light-tailed reward distributions, yet many real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Yunwen Guo , Yunlun Shu , Gongyi Zhuo , Tianyu Wang

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

In this paper we consider stochastic multiarmed bandit problems. Recently a policy, DMED, is proposed and proved to achieve the asymptotic bound for the model that each reward distribution is supported in a known bounded interval, e.g.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-02-20 Junya Honda , Akimichi Takemura

We study the problem of regret minimization in a multi-armed bandit setup where the agent is allowed to play multiple arms at each round by spreading the resources usually allocated to only one arm. At each iteration the agent selects a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Matias I. Müller , Cristian R. Rojas

In performative prediction, the deployment of a predictive model triggers a shift in the data distribution. As these shifts are typically unknown ahead of time, the learner needs to deploy a model to get feedback about the distribution it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Meena Jagadeesan , Tijana Zrnic , Celestine Mendler-Dünner

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 study stochastic linear optimization problem with bandit feedback. The set of arms take values in an $N$-dimensional space and belong to a bounded polyhedron described by finitely many linear inequalities. We provide a lower bound for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-09-29 Manjesh K. Hanawal , Amir Leshem , Venkatesh Saligrama

Fast changing states or volatile environments pose a significant challenge to online optimization, which needs to perform rapid adaptation under limited observation. In this paper, we give query and regret optimal bandit algorithms under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Zhou Lu , Qiuyi Zhang , Xinyi Chen , Fred Zhang , David Woodruff , Elad Hazan

We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem motivated by ``large'' action spaces, and endowed with a population of arms containing exactly $K$ arm-types, each characterized by a distinct mean reward. The decision maker is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-19 Anand Kalvit , Assaf Zeevi