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We study dynamic regret minimization in unconstrained adversarial linear bandit problems. In this setting, a learner must minimize the cumulative loss relative to an arbitrary sequence of comparators…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Alberto Rumi , Andrew Jacobsen , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Fabio Vitale

Many stochastic optimization algorithms work by estimating the gradient of the cost function on the fly by sampling datapoints uniformly at random from a training set. However, the estimator might have a large variance, which inadvertently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-10 Farnood Salehi , L. Elisa Celis , Patrick Thiran

This paper introduces a general framework for risk-sensitive bandits that integrates the notions of risk-sensitive objectives by adopting a rich class of distortion riskmetrics. The introduced framework subsumes the various existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-13 Meltem Tatlı , Arpan Mukherjee , Prashanth L. A. , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Ali Tajer

We investigate the high-dimensional sparse linear bandits problem in a data-poor regime where the time horizon is much smaller than the ambient dimension and number of arms. We study the setting under the additional blocking constraint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Adit Jain , Soumyabrata Pal , Sunav Choudhary , Ramasuri Narayanam , Harshita Chopra , Vikram Krishnamurthy

We propose a novel linear bandit algorithm called LinMED (Linear Minimum Empirical Divergence), which is a linear extension of the MED algorithm that was originally designed for multi-armed bandits. LinMED is a randomized algorithm that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-12 Kapilan Balagopalan , Kwang-Sung Jun

We study a generalization of the multi-armed bandit problem with multiple plays where there is a cost associated with pulling each arm and the agent has a budget at each time that dictates how much she can expect to spend. We derive an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-13 Alexander Luedtke , Emilie Kaufmann , Antoine Chambaz

Contextual bandits are a central framework for sequential decision-making, with applications ranging from recommendation systems to clinical trials. While nonparametric methods can flexibly model complex reward structures, they suffer from…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-01 Wanteng Ma , T. Tony Cai

The literature on bandit learning and regret analysis has focused on contexts where the goal is to converge on an optimal action in a manner that limits exploration costs. One shortcoming imposed by this orientation is that it does not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-01 Daniel Russo , David Tse , Benjamin Van Roy

We study the benefits of sparsity in nonparametric contextual bandit problems, in which the set of candidate features is countably or uncountably infinite. Our contribution is two-fold. First, using a novel reduction to sequences of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-16 Hamish Flynn , Julia Olkhovskaya , Paul Rognon-Vael

We study the regret of Thompson sampling (TS) algorithms for exponential family bandits, where the reward distribution is from a one-dimensional exponential family, which covers many common reward distributions including Bernoulli,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-09 Tianyuan Jin , Pan Xu , Xiaokui Xiao , Anima Anandkumar

We consider a bandit problem which involves sequential sampling from two populations (arms). Each arm produces a noisy reward realization which depends on an observable random covariate. The goal is to maximize cumulative expected reward.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2010-03-09 Philippe Rigollet , Assaf Zeevi

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 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

The stochastic multi-armed bandit setting has been recently studied in the non-stationary regime, where the mean payoff of each action is a non-decreasing function of the number of rounds passed since it was last played. This model captures…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Orestis Papadigenopoulos , Constantine Caramanis , Sanjay Shakkottai

We propose a new strategy for best-arm identification with fixed confidence of Gaussian variables with bounded means and unit variance. This strategy, called Exploration-Biased Sampling, is not only asymptotically optimal: it is to the best…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-03-08 Antoine Barrier , Aurélien Garivier , Tomáš Kocák

We propose the kl-UCB ++ algorithm for regret minimization in stochastic bandit models with exponential families of distributions. We prove that it is simultaneously asymptotically optimal (in the sense of Lai and Robbins' lower bound) and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-09-21 Pierre Ménard , Aurélien Garivier

In this paper, we contribute to the Extreme Bandit problem, a variant of Multi-Armed Bandits in which the learner seeks to collect the largest possible reward. We first study the concentration of the maximum of i.i.d random variables under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Dorian Baudry , Yoan Russac , Emilie Kaufmann

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

We consider linear stochastic bandits where the set of actions is an ellipsoid. We provide the first known minimax optimal algorithm for this problem. We first derive a novel information-theoretic lower bound on the regret of any algorithm,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-25 Raymond Zhang , Hedi Hadiji , Richard Combes

We study best arm identification in a variant of the multi-armed bandit problem where the learner has limited precision in arm selection. The learner can only sample arms via certain exploration bundles, which we refer to as boxes. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Kota Srinivas Reddy , P. N. Karthik , Nikhil Karamchandani , Jayakrishnan Nair