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Related papers: Dueling Bandits with Team Comparisons

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We consider the classic Multi-Armed Bandit setting to understand the exploration/exploitation tradeoffs made by different search heuristics. Since many search heuristics work by comparing different options (in evolutionary algorithms called…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Jasmin Brandt , Barbara Hammer , Timo Kötzing , Jurek Sander

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

Various approaches have emerged for multi-armed bandits in distributed systems. The multiplayer dueling bandit problem, common in scenarios with only preference-based information like human feedback, introduces challenges related to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Or Raveh , Junya Honda , Masashi Sugiyama

Learning from human preference data is becoming a useful tool, from fine-tuning large language models to training reinforcement learning agents. However, in most scenarios, the model is trained on the average preference of all human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Maheed H. Ahmed , Mahsa Ghasemi

Partial monitoring is a generic framework for sequential decision-making with incomplete feedback. It encompasses a wide class of problems such as dueling bandits, learning with expect advice, dynamic pricing, dark pools, and label…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Pratik Gajane , Tanguy Urvoy

In $K$-armed dueling bandits, the learner receives preference feedback between arms, and the regret of an arm is defined in terms of its suboptimality to a $\textit{winner}$ arm. The $\textit{non-stationary}$ variant of the problem,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Joe Suk , Arpit Agarwal

In machine learning, the notion of multi-armed bandits refers to a class of online learning problems, in which an agent is supposed to simultaneously explore and exploit a given set of choice alternatives in the course of a sequential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Viktor Bengs , Robert Busa-Fekete , Adil El Mesaoudi-Paul , Eyke Hüllermeier

The dueling bandit problem is a variation of the classical multi-armed bandit in which the allowable actions are noisy comparisons between pairs of arms. This paper focuses on a new approach for finding the "best" arm according to the Borda…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-02-03 Kevin Jamieson , Sumeet Katariya , Atul Deshpande , Robert Nowak

The $K$-armed dueling bandits problem, where the feedback is in the form of noisy pairwise preferences, has been widely studied due its applications in information retrieval, recommendation systems, etc. Motivated by concerns that user…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Joe Suk , Arpit Agarwal

We introduce the problem of sleeping dueling bandits with stochastic preferences and adversarial availabilities (DB-SPAA). In almost all dueling bandit applications, the decision space often changes over time; eg, retail store management,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-07 Aadirupa Saha , Pierre Gaillard

We adress the problem of dueling bandits defined on partially ordered sets, or posets. In this setting, arms may not be comparable, and there may be several (incomparable) optimal arms. We propose an algorithm, UnchainedBandits, that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-10 Julien Audiffren , Ralaivola Liva

We introduce the probably approximately correct (PAC) \emph{Battling-Bandit} problem with the Plackett-Luce (PL) subset choice model--an online learning framework where at each trial the learner chooses a subset of $k$ arms from a fixed set…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-05 Aadirupa Saha , Aditya Gopalan

We study the problem of combining multiple bandit algorithms (that is, online learning algorithms with partial feedback) with the goal of creating a master algorithm that performs almost as well as the best base algorithm if it were to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-07 Alekh Agarwal , Haipeng Luo , Behnam Neyshabur , Robert E. Schapire

We present algorithms for reducing the Dueling Bandits problem to the conventional (stochastic) Multi-Armed Bandits problem. The Dueling Bandits problem is an online model of learning with ordinal feedback of the form "A is preferred to B"…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-05-15 Nir Ailon , Thorsten Joachims , Zohar Karnin

Contextual dueling bandits form a cornerstone of preference-based decision-making, with critical applications in recommender systems and large language model alignment. However, standard algorithms rely on the idealized assumption of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Xiangyi Wang , Pingchen Lu , Jie Mao , Mingze Kong , Zhi Hong , Zhiyong Wang , Zhongxiang Dai

We consider the well-studied dueling bandit problem, where a learner aims to identify near-optimal actions using pairwise comparisons, under the constraint of differential privacy. We consider a general class of utility-based preference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-25 Aadirupa Saha , Hilal Asi

The dueling bandit problem, an essential variation of the traditional multi-armed bandit problem, has become significantly prominent recently due to its broad applications in online advertising, recommendation systems, information…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Bongsoo Yi , Yue Kang , Yao Li

Online ranker evaluation is one of the key challenges in information retrieval. While the preferences of rankers can be inferred by interleaving methods, the problem of how to effectively choose the ranker pair that generates the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-08-11 Chang Li , Ilya Markov , Maarten de Rijke , Masrour Zoghi

Learning from human feedback plays an important role in aligning generative models, such as large language models (LLM). However, the effectiveness of this approach can be influenced by adversaries, who may intentionally provide misleading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Qiwei Di , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

We present a new algorithm for the contextual bandit learning problem, where the learner repeatedly takes one of $K$ actions in response to the observed context, and observes the reward only for that chosen action. Our method assumes access…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-10-15 Alekh Agarwal , Daniel Hsu , Satyen Kale , John Langford , Lihong Li , Robert E. Schapire