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Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-11 Azar Louzi

We study the Inverse Contextual Bandit (ICB) problem, in which a learner seeks to optimize a policy while an observer, who cannot access the learner's rewards and only observes actions, aims to recover the underlying problem parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Yuqi Kong , Xiao Zhang , Weiran Shen

We study the offline contextual bandit problem, where we aim to acquire an optimal policy using observational data. However, this data usually contains two deficiencies: (i) some variables that confound actions are not observed, and (ii)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Siyu Chen , Yitan Wang , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

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

In many real-world applications such as recommendation systems, multiple learning agents must balance exploration and exploitation while maintaining safety guarantees to avoid catastrophic failures. We study the stochastic linear bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Amirhossein Afsharrad , Ahmadreza Moradipari , Sanjay Lall

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

An automatic machine learning (AutoML) task is to select the best algorithm and its hyper-parameters simultaneously. Previously, the hyper-parameters of all algorithms are joint as a single search space, which is not only huge but also…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Yi-Qi Hu , Yang Yu , Jun-Da Liao

Motivated by applications such as online labor markets we consider a variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where we have a collection of arms representing strategic agents with different performance characteristics. The…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Seyed A. Esmaeili , Suho Shin , Aleksandrs Slivkins

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a widely used algorithm in machine learning, particularly for neural network training. Recent studies on SGD for canonical quadratic optimization or linear regression show it attains well generalization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Haihan Zhang , Yuanshi Liu , Qianwen Chen , Cong Fang

We consider the stochastic linear (multi-armed) contextual bandit problem with the possibility of hidden simple multi-armed bandit structure in which the rewards are independent of the contextual information. Algorithms that are designed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-07 Niladri S. Chatterji , Vidya Muthukumar , Peter L. Bartlett

We study the problem of learning 'good' interventions in a stochastic environment modeled by its underlying causal graph. Good interventions refer to interventions that maximize rewards. Specifically, we consider the setting of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Fateme Jamshidi , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash

Motivated by recommendation problems in music streaming platforms, we propose a nonstationary stochastic bandit model in which the expected reward of an arm depends on the number of rounds that have passed since the arm was last pulled.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-20 Leonardo Cella , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-07 Branislav Kveton , Martin Mladenov , Chih-Wei Hsu , Manzil Zaheer , Csaba Szepesvari , Craig Boutilier

We formulate a new problem at the intersectionof semi-supervised learning and contextual bandits,motivated by several applications including clini-cal trials and ad recommendations. We demonstratehow Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Sohini Upadhyay , Mikhail Yurochkin , Mayank Agarwal , Yasaman Khazaeni , DjallelBouneffouf

We study a nonparametric contextual bandit problem where the expected reward functions belong to a H\"older class with smoothness parameter $\beta$. We show how this interpolates between two extremes that were previously studied in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-14 Yichun Hu , Nathan Kallus , Xiaojie Mao

We consider the distributed SGD problem, where a main node distributes gradient calculations among $n$ workers. By assigning tasks to all the workers and waiting only for the $k$ fastest ones, the main node can trade-off the algorithm's…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-06-29 Maximilian Egger , Rawad Bitar , Antonia Wachter-Zeh , Deniz Gündüz

This paper considers a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem in which multiple mobile agents receive rewards by sampling from a collection of spatially dispersed stochastic processes, called bandits. The goal is to formulate a decentralized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-01 Pathmanathan Pankayaraj , D. H. S. Maithripala , J. M. Berg

Contextual dueling bandits, where a learner compares two options based on context and receives feedback indicating which was preferred, extends classic dueling bandits by incorporating contextual information for decision-making and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-10 Xuheng Li , Heyang Zhao , Quanquan Gu

Neural networks are usually trained by some form of stochastic gradient descent (SGD)). A number of strategies are in common use intended to improve SGD optimization, such as learning rate schedules, momentum, and batching. These are…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2015-08-13 Thomas M. Breuel

Contextual bandit algorithms are commonly used in digital health to recommend personalized treatments. However, to ensure the effectiveness of the treatments, patients are often requested to take actions that have no immediate benefit to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Kyra Gan , Esmaeil Keyvanshokooh , Xueqing Liu , Susan Murphy