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Sequential decision-making algorithms such as multi-armed bandits can find optimal personalized decisions, but are notoriously sample-hungry. In personalized medicine, for example, training a bandit from scratch for every patient is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Ahmet Zahid Balcıoğlu , Newton Mwai , Emil Carlsson , Fredrik D. Johansson

Multi-armed bandits (MAB) model sequential decision making problems, in which a learner sequentially chooses arms with unknown reward distributions in order to maximize its cumulative reward. Most of the prior work on MAB assumes that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-22 Onur Atan , Cem Tekin , Mihaela van der Schaar

In pure-exploration problems, information is gathered sequentially to answer a question on the stochastic environment. While best-arm identification for linear bandits has been extensively studied in recent years, few works have been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-10 Marc Jourdan , Rémy Degenne

In this work I study the problem of adversarial perturbations to rewards, in a Multi-armed bandit (MAB) setting. Specifically, I focus on an adversarial attack to a UCB type best-arm identification policy applied to a stochastic MAB. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-14 Varsha Pendyala

Sequential decision-making under uncertainty often involves multiple agents learning which actions (arms) yield the highest rewards through repeated interaction with a stochastic environment. This setting is commonly modeled by cooperative…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-25 Evagoras Makridis , Themistoklis Charalambous

We study exploration in Multi-Armed Bandits in a setting where $k$ players collaborate in order to identify an $\epsilon$-optimal arm. Our motivation comes from recent employment of bandit algorithms in computationally intensive,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-11-05 Eshcar Hillel , Zohar Karnin , Tomer Koren , Ronny Lempel , Oren Somekh

We study the problem of best-arm identification with fixed confidence in stochastic linear bandits. The objective is to identify the best arm with a given level of certainty while minimizing the sampling budget. We devise a simple algorithm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-30 Yassir Jedra , Alexandre Proutiere

We introduce and study a new class of stochastic bandit problems, referred to as predictive bandits. In each round, the decision maker first decides whether to gather information about the rewards of particular arms (so that their rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-03 Simon Lindståhl , Alexandre Proutiere , Andreas Johnsson

Mobile Context-Aware Recommender Systems can be naturally modelled as an exploration/exploitation trade-off (exr/exp) problem, where the system has to choose between maximizing its expected rewards dealing with its current knowledge…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2014-08-12 Djallel Bouneffouf

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

Motivated by recursive learning in Markov Decision Processes, this paper studies best-arm identification in bandit problems where each arm's reward is drawn from a multinomial distribution with a known support. We compare the performance {…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Mehrasa Ahmadipour , élise Crepon , Aurélien Garivier

For a real-world decision-making problem, the reward function often needs to be engineered or learned. A popular approach is to utilize human feedback to learn a reward function for training. The most straightforward way to do so is to ask…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Xiang Ji , Huazheng Wang , Minshuo Chen , Tuo Zhao , Mengdi Wang

We study \emph{multi-armed bandits} (MABs) augmented with \emph{best-action queries}, in which the learner may additionally query an oracle that reveals the best arm in the current round. This setting was recently characterized by Russo et…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Francesco Bacchiocchi , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Francesco Emanuele Stradi

Motivated by modern applications, such as online advertisement and recommender systems, we study the top-$k$ extreme contextual bandits problem, where the total number of arms can be enormous, and the learner is allowed to select $k$ arms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-17 Rajat Sen , Alexander Rakhlin , Lexing Ying , Rahul Kidambi , Dean Foster , Daniel Hill , Inderjit Dhillon

In this paper, we study multi-armed bandit problems in explore-then-commit setting. In our proposed explore-then-commit setting, the goal is to identify the best arm after a pure experimentation (exploration) phase and exploit it once or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-16 Ali Yekkehkhany , Ebrahim Arian , Mohammad Hajiesmaili , Rakesh Nagi

We consider the best arm identification problem in the stochastic multi-armed bandit framework where each arm has a tiny probability of realizing large rewards while with overwhelming probability the reward is zero. A key application of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Anirban Bhattacharjee , Sushant Vijayan , Sandeep K Juneja

We consider a novel stochastic multi-armed bandit problem called {\em good arm identification} (GAI), where a good arm is defined as an arm with expected reward greater than or equal to a given threshold. GAI is a pure-exploration problem…

We consider the problem of contextual bandits and imitation learning, where the learner lacks direct knowledge of the executed action's reward. Instead, the learner can actively query an expert at each round to compare two actions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan , Wen Sun , Runzhe Wu

We investigate contextual bandits in the presence of side-observations across arms in order to design recommendation algorithms for users connected via social networks. Users in social networks respond to their friends' activity, and hence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Rahul Singh , Fang Liu , Xin Liu , Ness Shroff

In a linear stochastic bandit model, each arm is a vector in an Euclidean space and the observed return at each time step is an unknown linear function of the chosen arm at that time step. In this paper, we investigate the problem of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-25 Qiyu Kang , Wee Peng Tay