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We consider stochastic bandit problems with a continuous set of arms and where the expected reward is a continuous and unimodal function of the arm. No further assumption is made regarding the smoothness and the structure of the expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-09 Richard Combes , Alexandre Proutiere

We study regret minimization in online episodic linear Markov Decision Processes, and obtain rate-optimal $\widetilde O (\sqrt K)$ regret where $K$ denotes the number of episodes. Our work is the first to establish the optimal (w.r.t.~$K$)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-17 Uri Sherman , Alon Cohen , Tomer Koren , Yishay Mansour

We study the regret of optimal strategies for online convex optimization games. Using von Neumann's minimax theorem, we show that the optimal regret in this adversarial setting is closely related to the behavior of the empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2009-04-01 Jacob Abernethy , Alekh Agarwal , Peter L. Bartlett , Alexander Rakhlin

We study reinforcement learning for episodic Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) whose transitions are modelled by a multinomial logistic (MNL) model. Existing algorithms for MNL mixture MDPs yield a regret of $\smash{\tilde{O}(dH^2\sqrt{T})}$…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Pierre Boudart , Pierre Gaillard , Alessandro Rudi

In this paper, we study the contextual multinomial logit (MNL) bandit problem in which a learning agent sequentially selects an assortment based on contextual information, and user feedback follows an MNL choice model. There has been a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-17 Joongkyu Lee , Min-hwan Oh

We study the problem of adaptive control of the stochastic linear quadratic regulator (LQR) with constraints that must be satisfied at every time step. Prior work on the multidimensional problem has shown $\tilde{O}(T^{2/3})$ regret and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-08 Spencer Hutchinson , Nanfei Jiang , Mahnoosh Alizadeh

We study online finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes with adversarially changing loss and aggregate bandit feedback (a.k.a full-bandit). Under this type of feedback, the agent observes only the total loss incurred over the entire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Tal Lancewicki , Yishay Mansour

We consider the problem of controlling a Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) system over a finite horizon $T$ with fixed and known cost matrices $Q,R$, but unknown and non-stationary dynamics $\{A_t, B_t\}$. The sequence of dynamics matrices…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-21 Yuwei Luo , Varun Gupta , Mladen Kolar

We study the problem of \emph{dynamic regret minimization} in $K$-armed Dueling Bandits under non-stationary or time varying preferences. This is an online learning setup where the agent chooses a pair of items at each round and observes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Aadirupa Saha , Shubham Gupta

We study a bandit version of phase retrieval where the learner chooses actions $(A_t)_{t=1}^n$ in the $d$-dimensional unit ball and the expected reward is $\langle A_t, \theta_\star\rangle^2$ where $\theta_\star \in \mathbb R^d$ is an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-07 Tor Lattimore , Botao Hao

We present a new algorithm based on posterior sampling for learning in constrained Markov decision processes (CMDP) in the infinite-horizon undiscounted setting. The algorithm achieves near-optimal regret bounds while being advantageous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Danil Provodin , Pratik Gajane , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Maurits Kaptein

We investigate online convex optimization in non-stationary environments and choose dynamic regret as the performance measure, defined as the difference between cumulative loss incurred by the online algorithm and that of any feasible…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Peng Zhao , Yu-Jie Zhang , Lijun Zhang , Zhi-Hua Zhou

We present regret minimization algorithms for the contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) problem over $K$ actions in the presence of delayed feedback, a scenario where loss observations arrive with delays chosen by an adversary. As a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Orin Levy , Liad Erez , Alon Cohen , Yishay Mansour

In this work, we improve on the upper and lower bounds for the regret of online learning with strongly observable undirected feedback graphs. The best known upper bound for this problem is $\mathcal{O}\bigl(\sqrt{\alpha T\ln K}\bigr)$,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Khaled Eldowa , Emmanuel Esposito , Tommaso Cesari , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

A central issue lying at the heart of online reinforcement learning (RL) is data efficiency. While a number of recent works achieved asymptotically minimal regret in online RL, the optimality of these results is only guaranteed in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-30 Zihan Zhang , Yuxin Chen , Jason D. Lee , Simon S. Du

Policy learning in modern operations environments faces a fundamental tension between limited operational data and the large, often continuous, state and action spaces over which good decisions must be identified and deployed. We study…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-27 Shengbo Wang , Jose Blanchet , Peter Glynn

A new algorithm for regret minimization in online convex optimization is described. The regret of the algorithm after $T$ time periods is $O(\sqrt{T \log T})$ - which is the minimum possible up to a logarithmic term. In addition, the new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-24 Elad Hazan , Nimrod Megiddo

This paper introduces and addresses a wide class of stochastic bandit problems where the function mapping the arm to the corresponding reward exhibits some known structural properties. Most existing structures (e.g. linear, Lipschitz,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-02 Richard Combes , Stefan Magureanu , Alexandre Proutiere

In this paper, we consider the multi-armed bandit problem with high-dimensional features. First, we prove a minimax lower bound, $\mathcal{O}\big((\log d)^{\frac{\alpha+1}{2}}T^{\frac{1-\alpha}{2}}+\log T\big)$, for the cumulative regret,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Ke Li , Yun Yang , Naveen N. Narisetty

We investigate the stochastic Thresholding Bandit problem (TBP) under several shape constraints. On top of (i) the vanilla, unstructured TBP, we consider the case where (ii) the sequence of arm's means $(\mu_k)_k$ is monotonically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 James Cheshire , Pierre Menard , Alexandra Carpentier