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We study the problem of stochastic contextual bandits in the agnostic setting, where the goal is to compete with the best policy in a given class without assuming realizability or imposing model restrictions on losses or rewards. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-06 Samuel Girard , Aurelien Bibaut , Arthur Gretton , Nathan Kallus , Houssam Zenati

We study the kernelized bandit problem, that involves designing an adaptive strategy for querying a noisy zeroth-order-oracle to efficiently learn about the optimizer of an unknown function $f$ with a norm bounded by $M<\infty$ in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Shubhanshu Shekhar , Tara Javidi

In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, instance-dependent algorithms attain improved performance on "easy" problems with a gap between the best and second-best arm. Are similar guarantees possible for contextual bandits? While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin , David Simchi-Levi , Yunzong Xu

Many works have developed no-regret algorithms for contextual bandits with function approximation, where the mean reward function over context-action pairs belongs to a function class. Although there are many approaches to this problem, one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Aldo Pacchiano

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 presents new \emph{variance-aware} confidence sets for linear bandits and linear mixture Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). With the new confidence sets, we obtain the follow regret bounds: For linear bandits, we obtain an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-01 Zihan Zhang , Jiaqi Yang , Xiangyang Ji , Simon S. Du

In this paper we initiate a study of non parametric contextual bandits under shape constraints on the mean reward function. Specifically, we study a setting where the context is one dimensional, and the mean reward function is isotonic with…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-10-22 Sabyasachi Chatterjee , Subhabrata Sen

Stochastic linear bandits are a fundamental model for sequential decision making, where an agent selects a vector-valued action and receives a noisy reward with expected value given by an unknown linear function. Although well studied in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Bruce Huang , Ruida Zhou , Lin F. Yang , Suhas Diggavi

We introduce a novel online learning framework that unifies and generalizes pre-established models, such as delayed and corrupted feedback, to encompass adversarial environments where action feedback evolves over time. In this setting, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Yogev Bar-On , Yishay Mansour

We propose a simple model selection approach for algorithms in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. As opposed to prior work that (implicitly) assumes knowledge of the optimal regret, we only require that each base…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Aldo Pacchiano , Christoph Dann , Claudio Gentile , Peter Bartlett

In this paper, we investigate the stochastic contextual bandit with general function space and graph feedback. We propose an algorithm that addresses this problem by adapting to both the underlying graph structures and reward gaps. To the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Xueping Gong , Jiheng Zhang

We study the distribution of regret in stochastic multi-armed bandits and episodic reinforcement learning through a unified framework. We formalize a distributional regret bound as a probabilistic guarantee that holds uniformly over all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Harin Lee , Min-hwan Oh

We consider model selection in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. Given a set of base learning algorithms, an effective model selection strategy adapts to the best learning algorithm in an online fashion. We show that by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Aldo Pacchiano , My Phan

Learning good interventions in a causal graph can be modelled as a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with side-information. First, we study this problem when interventions are more expensive than observations and a budget is specified.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-15 Vineet Nair , Vishakha Patil , Gaurav Sinha

Multi-armed Bandit motivates methods with provable upper bounds on regret and also the counterpart lower bounds have been extensively studied in this context. Recently, Multi-agent Multi-armed Bandit has gained significant traction in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-17 Mengfan Xu , Diego Klabjan

Cascading bandit (CB) is a popular model for web search and online advertising, where an agent aims to learn the $K$ most attractive items out of a ground set of size $L$ during the interaction with a user. However, the stationary CB model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-18 Lingda Wang , Huozhi Zhou , Bingcong Li , Lav R. Varshney , Zhizhen Zhao

We study linear bandits when the underlying reward function is not linear. Existing work relies on a uniform misspecification parameter $\epsilon$ that measures the sup-norm error of the best linear approximation. This results in an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Chong Liu , Ming Yin , Yu-Xiang Wang

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 study bandit learning in matching markets, where players and arms constitute the two market sides, and the players' utilities are linear in the arm contexts. In each round, new arms arrive with observable contexts. Then, the algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Shiyun Lin , Simon Mauras , Vianney Perchet , Nadav Merlis

In this paper, we consider a best action identification problem in the stochastic linear bandit setup with a fixed confident constraint. In the considered best action identification problem, instead of minimizing the accumulative regret as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-04 Jun Geng , Lifeng Lai