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The combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) is a fundamental sequential decision-making framework, extensively studied over the past decade. However, existing work primarily focuses on the online setting, overlooking the substantial costs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Xutong Liu , Xiangxiang Dai , Jinhang Zuo , Siwei Wang , Carlee Joe-Wong , John C. S. Lui , Wei Chen

In this paper, we study the offline RL problem with linear function approximation. Our main structural assumption is that the MDP has low inherent Bellman error, which stipulates that linear value functions have linear Bellman backups with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra

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

In this paper, we study a special bandit setting of online stochastic linear optimization, where only one-bit of information is revealed to the learner at each round. This problem has found many applications including online advertisement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-09-28 Lijun Zhang , Tianbao Yang , Rong Jin , Zhi-Hua Zhou

With the fast development of big data, learning the optimal decision rule by recursively updating it and making online decisions has been easier than before. We study the online statistical inference of model parameters in a contextual…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-22 Xiangyu Chang , Xi Chen , Zehua Lai , He Li , Zhihong Liu , Yichen Zhang

We study the sequential batch learning problem in linear contextual bandits with finite action sets, where the decision maker is constrained to split incoming individuals into (at most) a fixed number of batches and can only observe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-15 Yanjun Han , Zhengqing Zhou , Zhengyuan Zhou , Jose Blanchet , Peter W. Glynn , Yinyu Ye

We study nonparametric contextual bandits under batch constraints, where the expected reward for each action is modeled as a smooth function of covariates, and the policy updates are made at the end of each batch of observations. We…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-06 Rong Jiang , Cong Ma

The off-policy learning paradigm allows for recommender systems and general ranking applications to be framed as decision-making problems, where we aim to learn decision policies that optimize an unbiased offline estimate of an online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-15 Shashank Gupta , Olivier Jeunen , Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

We study contextual bandits with budget and time constraints, referred to as constrained contextual bandits.The time and budget constraints significantly complicate the exploration and exploitation tradeoff because they introduce complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-10-20 Huasen Wu , R. Srikant , Xin Liu , Chong Jiang

Safety is a desirable property that can immensely increase the applicability of learning algorithms in real-world decision-making problems. It is much easier for a company to deploy an algorithm that is safe, i.e., guaranteed to perform at…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-07 Abbas Kazerouni , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Benjamin Van Roy

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

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

We study the linear stochastic bandit problem, relaxing the standard i.i.d. assumption on the observation noise. As an alternative to this restrictive assumption, we allow the noise terms across rounds to be sub-Gaussian but interdependent,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-28 Baptiste Abélès , Eugenio Clerico , Hamish Flynn , Gergely Neu

We study the contextual continuum bandits problem, where the learner sequentially receives a side information vector and has to choose an action in a convex set, minimizing a function associated with the context. The goal is to minimize all…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-28 Arya Akhavan , Karim Lounici , Massimiliano Pontil , Alexandre B. Tsybakov

Recently, several studies (Zhou et al., 2021a; Zhang et al., 2021b; Kim et al., 2021; Zhou and Gu, 2022) have provided variance-dependent regret bounds for linear contextual bandits, which interpolates the regret for the worst-case regime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Heyang Zhao , Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Tong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

Stochastic linear contextual bandit algorithms have substantial applications in practice, such as recommender systems, online advertising, clinical trials, etc. Recent works show that optimal bandit algorithms are vulnerable to adversarial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-31 Qin Ding , Cho-Jui Hsieh , James Sharpnack

Contextual bandit with linear reward functions is among one of the most extensively studied models in bandit and online learning research. Recently, there has been increasing interest in designing \emph{locally private} linear contextual…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-16 Jiachun Li , David Simchi-Levi , Yining Wang

Batch policy optimization considers leveraging existing data for policy construction before interacting with an environment. Although interest in this problem has grown significantly in recent years, its theoretical foundations remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-07 Chenjun Xiao , Yifan Wu , Tor Lattimore , Bo Dai , Jincheng Mei , Lihong Li , Csaba Szepesvari , Dale Schuurmans

This paper proposes a linear bandit algorithm that is adaptive to environments at two different levels of hierarchy. At the higher level, the proposed algorithm adapts to a variety of types of environments. More precisely, it achieves…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-27 Shinji Ito , Kei Takemura

Conservative Contextual Bandits (CCBs) address safety in sequential decision making by requiring that an agent's policy, along with minimizing regret, also satisfies a safety constraint: the performance is not worse than a baseline policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Rohan Deb , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Arindam Banerjee