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The multi-armed bandit problem is a core framework for sequential decision-making under uncertainty, but classical algorithms often fail in environments with hidden, time-varying states that confound reward estimation and optimal action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Jikai Jin , Kenneth Hung , Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Baoyi Shi , Congshan Zhang

We study the linear contextual bandit problem in the presence of adversarial corruption, where the reward at each round is corrupted by an adversary, and the corruption level (i.e., the sum of corruption magnitudes over the horizon) is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Tong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

This paper studies bandit convex optimization in non-stationary environments with two-point feedback, using dynamic regret as the performance measure. We propose an algorithm based on bandit mirror descent that extends naturally to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-26 Chang He , Bo Jiang , Shuzhong Zhang

Unlike classical control theory, such as Linear Quadratic Control (LQC), real-world control problems are highly complex. These problems often involve adversarial perturbations, bandit feedback models, and non-quadratic, adversarially chosen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Y. Jennifer Sun , Zhou Lu

We study the causal bandit problem when the causal graph is unknown and develop an efficient algorithm for finding the parent node of the reward node using atomic interventions. We derive the exact equation for the expected number of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-09 Mikhail Konobeev , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash

Contextual bandits serve as a fundamental model for many sequential decision making tasks. The most popular theoretically justified approaches are based on the optimism principle. While these algorithms can be practical, they are known to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-17 Botao Hao , Tor Lattimore , Csaba Szepesvari

This paper studies semiparametric contextual bandits, a generalization of the linear stochastic bandit problem where the reward for an action is modeled as a linear function of known action features confounded by an non-linear…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-17 Akshay Krishnamurthy , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Vasilis Syrgkanis

Cascading bandits is a natural and popular model that frames the task of learning to rank from Bernoulli click feedback in a bandit setting. For the case of unstructured rewards, we prove matching upper and lower bounds for the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Daniel Vial , Sujay Sanghavi , Sanjay Shakkottai , R. Srikant

We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with i.i.d. rewards where the expected reward function is multimodal with at most m modes. We propose the first known computationally tractable algorithm for computing the solution to the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-31 William Réveillard , Richard Combes

We consider the framework of methods for unconstrained minimization that are, in each iteration, restricted to a model that is only a valid approximation to the objective function on some affine subspace containing an incumbent point. These…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-26 Matt Menickelly

We study contextual bandits with low-rank structure where, in each round, if the (context, arm) pair $(i,j)\in [m]\times [n]$ is selected, the learner observes a noisy sample of the $(i,j)$-th entry of an unknown low-rank reward matrix.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Yassir Jedra , William Réveillard , Stefan Stojanovic , Alexandre Proutiere

We study stochastic linear optimization problem with bandit feedback. The set of arms take values in an $N$-dimensional space and belong to a bounded polyhedron described by finitely many linear inequalities. We provide a lower bound for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-09-29 Manjesh K. Hanawal , Amir Leshem , Venkatesh Saligrama

We consider a novel stochastic multi-armed bandit setting, where playing an arm makes it unavailable for a fixed number of time slots thereafter. This models situations where reusing an arm too often is undesirable (e.g. making the same…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Soumya Basu , Rajat Sen , Sujay Sanghavi , Sanjay Shakkottai

In this paper, we analyze the continuous armed bandit problems for nonconvex cost functions under certain smoothness and sublevel set assumptions. We first derive an upper bound on the expected cumulative regret of a simple bin splitting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-31 Puning Zhao , Lifeng Lai

We study reward maximisation in a wide class of structured stochastic multi-armed bandit problems, where the mean rewards of arms satisfy some given structural constraints, e.g. linear, unimodal, sparse, etc. Our aim is to develop methods…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-03 Rémy Degenne , Han Shao , Wouter M. Koolen

A fundamental challenge in contextual bandits is to develop flexible, general-purpose algorithms with computational requirements no worse than classical supervised learning tasks such as classification and regression. Algorithms based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin

We study contextual bandits in the presence of a stage-wise constraint when the constraint must be satisfied both with high probability and in expectation. We start with the linear case where both the reward function and the stage-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Aldo Pacchiano , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Peter Bartlett

We introduce the "inverse bandit" problem of estimating the rewards of a multi-armed bandit instance from observing the learning process of a low-regret demonstrator. Existing approaches to the related problem of inverse reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-23 Wenshuo Guo , Kumar Krishna Agrawal , Aditya Grover , Vidya Muthukumar , Ashwin Pananjady

Bandit Convex Optimization is a fundamental class of sequential decision-making problems, where the learner selects actions from a continuous domain and observes a loss (but not its gradient) at only one point per round. We study this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-02 Xiaoqi Liu , Dorian Baudry , Julian Zimmert , Patrick Rebeschini , Arya Akhavan

Modifying the reward-biased maximum likelihood method originally proposed in the adaptive control literature, we propose novel learning algorithms to handle the explore-exploit trade-off in linear bandits problems as well as generalized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-09 Yu-Heng Hung , Ping-Chun Hsieh , Xi Liu , P. R. Kumar