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Multi-player multi-armed bandits (MMAB) study how decentralized players cooperatively play the same multi-armed bandit so as to maximize their total cumulative rewards. Existing MMAB models mostly assume when more than one player pulls the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-29 Xuchuang Wang , Hong Xie , John C. S. Lui

In decentralized cooperative multi-armed bandits (MAB), each agent observes a distinct stream of rewards, and seeks to exchange information with others to select a sequence of arms so as to minimize its regret. Agents in the cooperative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Jingxuan Zhu , Alec Koppel , Alvaro Velasquez , Ji Liu

We formulate and study a decentralized multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem. There are M distributed players competing for N independent arms. Each arm, when played, offers i.i.d. reward according to a distribution with an unknown parameter. At…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-05-14 Keqin Liu , Qing Zhao

Solving tasks with sparse rewards is one of the most important challenges in reinforcement learning. In the single-agent setting, this challenge is addressed by introducing intrinsic rewards that motivate agents to explore unseen regions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha

In many platforms, user arrivals exhibit a self-reinforcing behavior: future user arrivals are likely to have preferences similar to users who were satisfied in the past. In other words, arrivals exhibit positive externalities. We study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-08 Virag Shah , Jose Blanchet , Ramesh Johari

Multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a class of online learning problems where a learning agent aims to maximize its expected cumulative reward while repeatedly selecting to pull arms with unknown reward distributions. We consider a scenario where…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-25 Yang Cao , Zheng Wen , Branislav Kveton , Yao Xie

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

We study a strategic version of the multi-armed bandit problem, where each arm is an individual strategic agent and we, the principal, pull one arm each round. When pulled, the arm receives some private reward $v_a$ and can choose an amount…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-07-03 Mark Braverman , Jieming Mao , Jon Schneider , S. Matthew Weinberg

In many real-world applications such as recommendation systems, multiple learning agents must balance exploration and exploitation while maintaining safety guarantees to avoid catastrophic failures. We study the stochastic linear bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Amirhossein Afsharrad , Ahmadreza Moradipari , Sanjay Lall

In recent years, multi-player multi-armed bandits (MP-MAB) have been extensively studied due to their wide applications in cognitive radio networks and Internet of Things systems. While most existing research on MP-MAB focuses on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Jingqi Fan , Canzhe Zhao , Shuai Li , Siwei Wang

Experimentation with interference poses a significant challenge in contemporary online platforms. Prior research on experimentation with interference has concentrated on the final output of a policy. The cumulative performance, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-17 Su Jia , Peter Frazier , Nathan Kallus

We consider the query recommendation problem in closed loop interactive learning settings like online information gathering and exploratory analytics. The problem can be naturally modelled using the Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) framework with…

Efficient selection among multiple generative models is increasingly important in modern generative AI, where sampling from suboptimal models is costly. This problem can be formulated as a multi-armed bandit task. Under diversity-aware…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Bahar Dibaei Nia , Farzan Farnia

A challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) is minimizing the cost of sampling associated with exploration. Distributed exploration reduces sampling complexity in multi-agent RL (MARL). We investigate the benefits to performance in MARL when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Justin Lidard , Udari Madhushani , Naomi Ehrich Leonard

We define a general framework for a large class of combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) problems, where subsets of base arms with unknown distributions form super arms. In each round, a super arm is played and the base arms contained in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-30 Wei Chen , Yajun Wang , Yang Yuan , Qinshi Wang

We consider a multi-armed bandit setting in which each arm has a public and a private reward distribution. An observer expects an agent to follow Thompson Sampling according to the public rewards, however, the deceptive agent aims to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 I. Arda Vurankaya , Mustafa O. Karabag , Wesley A. Suttle , Jesse Milzman , David Fridovich-Keil , Ufuk Topcu

The Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) framework highlights the tension between acquiring new knowledge (Exploration) and leveraging available knowledge (Exploitation). In the classical MAB problem, a decision maker must choose an arm at each time…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-03 Nir Levine , Koby Crammer , Shie Mannor

Consider a requester who wishes to crowdsource a series of identical binary labeling tasks to a pool of workers so as to achieve an assured accuracy for each task, in a cost optimal way. The workers are heterogeneous with unknown but fixed…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-06-18 Shweta Jain , Sujit Gujar , Satyanath Bhat , Onno Zoeter , Y. Narahari

Stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) mechanisms are widely used in sponsored search auctions, crowdsourcing, online procurement, etc. Existing stochastic MAB mechanisms with a deterministic payment rule, proposed in the literature,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-06-01 Divya Padmanabhan , Satyanath Bhat , Prabuchandran K. J. , Shirish Shevade , Y. Narahari

High sample complexity remains a barrier to the application of reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in multi-agent systems. A large body of work has demonstrated that exploration mechanisms based on the principle of optimism under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-02 Robert Loftin , Aadirupa Saha , Sam Devlin , Katja Hofmann