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Related papers: Combinatorial Pure Exploration with Bottleneck Rew…

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Zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to learn a family of policies from a reward-free dataset, and recover optimal policies for any reward function directly at test time. Naturally, the quality of the pretraining dataset…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Jiajun Hu , Nuria Armengol Urpi , Jin Cheng , Stelian Coros

In this paper, we provide the first investigation into adaptive combinatorial experimental design, focusing on the trade-off between regret minimization and statistical power in combinatorial multi-armed bandits (CMAB). While minimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Hongrui Xie , Junyu Cao , Kan Xu

In a sequential decision-making problem, having a structural dependency amongst the reward distributions associated with the arms makes it challenging to identify a subset of alternatives that guarantees the optimal collective outcome.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-27 Behzad Nourani-Koliji , Saeed Ghoorchian , Setareh Maghsudi

Learning with hidden variables is a central challenge in probabilistic graphical models that has important implications for many real-life problems. The classical approach is using the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-12-12 Gal Elidan , Nir Friedman

In federated multi-armed bandit problems, maximizing global reward while satisfying minimum privacy requirements to protect clients is the main goal. To formulate such problems, we consider a combinatorial contextual bandit setting with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Sepehr Elahi , Baran Atalar , Sevda Öğüt , Cem Tekin

We study the Bandit Clustering (BC) problem under the fixed confidence setting, where the objective is to group a collection of data sequences (arms) into clusters through sequential sampling from adaptively selected arms at each time step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 G Dhinesh Chandran , Kota Srinivas Reddy , Srikrishna Bhashyam

We consider the combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) problem, where the reward function is nonlinear. In this setting, the agent chooses a batch of arms on each round and receives feedback from each arm of the batch. The reward that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Nadav Merlis , Shie Mannor

Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit with fairness constraints is a framework where multiple arms form a super arm and can be pulled in each round under uncertainty to maximize cumulative rewards while ensuring the minimum average reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Xiaoyi Wu , Bo Ji , Bin Li

The contextual combinatorial semi-bandit problem with linear payoff functions is a decision-making problem in which a learner chooses a set of arms with the feature vectors in each round under given constraints so as to maximize the sum of…

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is believed to have higher sample efficiency compared with model-free reinforcement learning (MFRL). However, MBRL is plagued by dynamics bottleneck dilemma. Dynamics bottleneck dilemma is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Xiyao Wang , Junge Zhang , Wenzhen Huang , Qiyue Yin

We consider the combinatorial bandits problem, where at each time step, the online learner selects a size-$k$ subset $s$ from the arms set $\mathcal{A}$, where $\left|\mathcal{A}\right| = n$, and observes a stochastic reward of each arm in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-05 Shuo Yang , Tongzheng Ren , Inderjit S. Dhillon , Sujay Sanghavi

A core element in decision-making under uncertainty is the feedback on the quality of the performed actions. However, in many applications, such feedback is restricted. For example, in recommendation systems, repeatedly asking the user to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Yonathan Efroni , Nadav Merlis , Aadirupa Saha , Shie Mannor

Information bottleneck (IB) and privacy funnel (PF) are two closely related optimization problems which have found applications in machine learning, design of privacy algorithms, capacity problems (e.g., Mrs. Gerber's Lemma), strong data…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-12-30 Shahab Asoodeh , Flavio Calmon

We propose the first fully-adaptive algorithm for pure exploration in linear bandits---the task to find the arm with the largest expected reward, which depends on an unknown parameter linearly. While existing methods partially or entirely…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-10-17 Liyuan Xu , Junya Honda , Masashi Sugiyama

Stochastic multi-armed bandits are a sequential-decision-making framework, where, at each interaction step, the learner selects an arm and observes a stochastic reward. Within the context of best-arm identification (BAI) problems, the goal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-15 Riccardo Poiani , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

Pure exploration in multi-armed bandits has emerged as an important framework for modeling decision-making and search under uncertainty. In modern applications, however, one is often faced with a tremendously large number of options. Even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Parth K. Thaker , Mohit Malu , Nikhil Rao , Gautam Dasarathy

The Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE) paradigm is widely used in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning. However, conventional methods based on CTDE can suffer from value underestimation and converge to…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Ruoning Zhang , Siying Wang , Wenyu Chen , Yang Zhou , Zhitong Zhao , Zixuan Zhang , Ruijie Zhang , Stefano V. Albrecht

We consider the problem of pure exploration with subset-wise preference feedback, which contains $N$ arms with features. The learner is allowed to query subsets of size $K$ and receives feedback in the form of a noisy winner. The goal of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Shubham Gupta , Aadirupa Saha , Sumeet Katariya

We study policy optimization in an infinite horizon, $\gamma$-discounted constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). Our objective is to return a policy that achieves large expected reward with a small constraint violation. We consider the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-12 Arushi Jain , Sharan Vaswani , Reza Babanezhad , Csaba Szepesvari , Doina Precup

Combinatorial bandits extend the classical bandit framework to settings where the learner selects multiple arms in each round, motivated by applications such as online recommendation and assortment optimization. While extensions of upper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Yuxiao Wen , Yanjun Han , Zhengyuan Zhou