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Related papers: Social learning via actions in bandit environments

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We study a repeated game with payoff externalities and observable actions where two players receive information over time about an underlying payoff-relevant state, and strategically coordinate their actions. Players learn about the true…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2018-09-05 Pathikrit Basu , Kalyan Chatterjee , Tetsuya Hoshino , Omer Tamuz

The sharing of scarce resources among multiple rational agents is one of the classical problems in economics. In exchange economies, which are used to model such situations, agents begin with an initial endowment of resources and exchange…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-23 Wenshuo Guo , Kirthevasan Kandasamy , Joseph E Gonzalez , Michael I. Jordan , Ion Stoica

Personalized AI-based services involve a population of individual reinforcement learning agents. However, most reinforcement learning algorithms focus on harnessing individual learning and fail to leverage the social learning capabilities…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Erfan Mirzaei , Seyed Pooya Shariatpanahi , Alireza Tavakoli , Reshad Hosseini , Majid Nili Ahmadabadi

We study the repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal indirectly interacts with the unknown environment by proposing incentives for the agent to play arms. Most existing work assumes the agent has full knowledge of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Junyan Liu , Lillian J. Ratliff

Exploration policies in Bayesian bandits maximize the average reward over problem instances drawn from some distribution $\mathcal{P}$. In this work, we learn such policies for an unknown distribution $\mathcal{P}$ using samples from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Craig Boutilier , Chih-Wei Hsu , Branislav Kveton , Martin Mladenov , Csaba Szepesvari , Manzil Zaheer

Reinforcement learning studies how to balance exploration and exploitation in real-world systems, optimizing interactions with the world while simultaneously learning how the world operates. One general class of algorithms for such learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-10 Iñigo Urteaga , Chris H. Wiggins

We consider the contextual bandit problem on general action and context spaces, where the learner's rewards depend on their selected actions and an observable context. This generalizes the standard multi-armed bandit to the case where side…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-03 Moise Blanchard , Steve Hanneke , Patrick Jaillet

This paper studies an exponential bandit model in which a group of agents collectively decide whether to undertake a risky action $R$. This action is implemented if the fraction of agents voting for it exceeds a predetermined threshold $k$.…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-10-21 Kailin Chen

We advance the study of incentivized bandit exploration, in which arm choices are viewed as recommendations and are required to be Bayesian incentive compatible. Recent work has shown under certain independence assumptions that after…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Mark Sellke

Intelligent agents equipped with causal knowledge can optimize their action spaces to avoid unnecessary exploration. The structural causal bandit framework provides a graphical characterization for identifying actions that are unable to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Min Woo Park , Sanghack Lee

Recommendation systems often face exploration-exploitation tradeoffs: the system can only learn about the desirability of new options by recommending them to some user. Such systems can thus be modeled as multi-armed bandit settings;…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-07-02 Gal Bahar , Omer Ben-Porat , Kevin Leyton-Brown , Moshe Tennenholtz

A contextual bandit problem is studied in a highly non-stationary environment, which is ubiquitous in various recommender systems due to the time-varying interests of users. Two models with disjoint and hybrid payoffs are considered to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Xiao Xu , Fang Dong , Yanghua Li , Shaojian He , Xin Li

In bandit settings, optimizing long-term regret metrics requires exploration, which corresponds to sometimes taking myopically sub-optimal actions. When a long-lived principal merely recommends actions to be executed by a sequence of…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Ramya Ramalingam , Osbert Bastani , Aaron Roth

Contextual bandits have the same exploration-exploitation trade-off as standard multi-armed bandits. On adding positive externalities that decay with time, this problem becomes much more difficult as wrong decisions at the start are hard to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-15 Harsh Deshpande , Vishal Jain , Sharayu Moharir

Multi-armed bandit algorithms have become a reference solution for handling the explore/exploit dilemma in recommender systems, and many other important real-world problems, such as display advertisement. However, such algorithms usually…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-25 Qingyun Wu , Naveen Iyer , Hongning Wang

A recent body of work addresses safety constraints in explore-and-exploit systems. Such constraints arise where, for example, exploration is carried out by individuals whose welfare should be balanced with overall welfare. In this paper, we…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Gal Bahar , Omer Ben-Porat , Kevin Leyton-Brown , Moshe Tennenholtz

We consider a scenario where an agent has multiple available strategies to explore an unknown environment. For each new interaction with the environment, the agent must select which exploration strategy to use. We provide a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-24 Fabien C. Y. Benureau , Pierre-Yves Oudeyer

Contextual bandits are canonical models for sequential decision-making under uncertainty in environments with time-varying components. In this setting, the expected reward of each bandit arm consists of the inner product of an unknown…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-05-27 Hongju Park , Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh

We consider an adversarial online learning setting where a decision maker can choose an action in every stage of the game. In addition to observing the reward of the chosen action, the decision maker gets side observations on the reward he…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-10-26 Shie Mannor , Ohad Shamir

We consider a ubiquitous scenario in the Internet economy when individual decision-makers (henceforth, agents) both produce and consume information as they make strategic choices in an uncertain environment. This creates a three-way…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-04-09 Yishay Mansour , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Zhiwei Steven Wu