English
Related papers

Related papers: Learning from an Exploring Demonstrator: Optimal R…

200 papers

In algorithm optimization in reinforcement learning, how to deal with the exploration-exploitation dilemma is particularly important. Multi-armed bandit problem can optimize the proposed solutions by changing the reward distribution to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-28 Zhendong Shi , Ercan E. Kuruoglu , Xiaoli Wei

In the infinite-armed bandit problem, each arm's average reward is sampled from an unknown distribution, and each arm can be sampled further to obtain noisy estimates of the average reward of that arm. Prior work focuses on identifying the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Yifei Wang , Tavor Baharav , Yanjun Han , Jiantao Jiao , David Tse

The Competing Bandits framework is a recently emerging area that integrates multi-armed bandits in online learning with stable matching in game theory. While conventional models assume that all players and arms are constantly available, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Shinnosuke Uba , Yutaro Yamaguchi

We study meta-learning for adversarial multi-armed bandits. We consider the online-within-online setup, in which a player (learner) encounters a sequence of multi-armed bandit episodes. The player's performance is measured as regret against…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-13 Ilya Osadchiy , Kfir Y. Levy , Ron Meir

Active learning methods have shown great promise in reducing the number of samples necessary for learning. As automated learning systems are adopted into real-time, real-world decision-making pipelines, it is increasingly important that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Romain Camilleri , Andrew Wagenmaker , Jamie Morgenstern , Lalit Jain , Kevin Jamieson

We propose a new bootstrap-based online algorithm for stochastic linear bandit problems. The key idea is to adopt residual bootstrap exploration, in which the agent estimates the next step reward by re-sampling the residuals of mean reward…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-20 Shuang Wu , Chi-Hua Wang , Yuantong Li , Guang Cheng

In practice, incentive providers (i.e., principals) often cannot observe the reward realizations of incentivized agents, which is in contrast to many principal-agent models that have been previously studied. This information asymmetry…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Ilgin Dogan , Zuo-Jun Max Shen , Anil Aswani

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

Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) algorithms are widely used in recommender systems that require continuous, incremental learning. A core aspect of MABs is the exploration-exploitation trade-off: choosing between exploiting items likely to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Pedro R. Pires , Gregorio F. Azevedo , Pietro L. Campos , Rafael T. Sereicikas , Tiago A. Almeida

We study the problem of pure exploration in matching markets under uncertain preferences, where the goal is to identify a stable matching with confidence parameter $\delta$ and minimal sample complexity. Agents learn preferences via…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Tejas Pagare , Agniv Bandyopadhyay , Sandeep Juneja

In this paper, we investigate a new multi-armed bandit (MAB) online learning model that considers real-world phenomena in many recommender systems: (i) the learning agent cannot pull the arms by itself and thus has to offer rewards to users…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Tianchen Zhou , Jia Liu , Chaosheng Dong , Jingyuan Deng

Restless multi-armed bandits (RMAB) play a central role in modeling sequential decision making problems under an instantaneous activation constraint that at most B arms can be activated at any decision epoch. Each restless arm is endowed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Guojun Xiong , Jian Li

Information-directed sampling (IDS) is a powerful framework for solving bandit problems which has shown strong results in both Bayesian and frequentist settings. However, frequentist IDS, like many other bandit algorithms, requires that one…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-10 Piotr M. Suder , Eric Laber

We introduce a novel extension of the canonical multi-armed bandit problem that incorporates an additional strategic innovation: abstention. In this enhanced framework, the agent is not only tasked with selecting an arm at each time step,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Junwen Yang , Tianyuan Jin , Vincent Y. F. Tan

In this paper, we propose a novel perturbation-based exploration method in bandit algorithms with bounded or unbounded rewards, called residual bootstrap exploration (\texttt{ReBoot}). The \texttt{ReBoot} enforces exploration by injecting…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-21 Chi-Hua Wang , Yang Yu , Botao Hao , Guang Cheng

This work handles the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem where only a small number of demonstrations are available from a demonstrator for each high-dimensional task, insufficient to estimate an accurate reward function. Observing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-16 Kun Li , Joel W. Burdick

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

We present a new algorithm based on an gradient ascent for a general Active Exploration bandit problem in the fixed confidence setting. This problem encompasses several well studied problems such that the Best Arm Identification or…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-21 Pierre Ménard

The Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit problem is a sequential decision-making problem in which an agent selects a set of arms on each round, observes feedback for each of these arms and aims to maximize a known reward function of the arms it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-17 Nadav Merlis , Shie Mannor

With reinforcement learning, an agent could learn complex behaviors from high-level abstractions of the task. However, exploration and reward shaping remained challenging for existing methods, especially in scenarios where the extrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Jie Chen , Wenjun Xu