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Related papers: Variance-Aware Sparse Linear Bandits

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We propose a black-box reduction that turns a certain reinforcement learning algorithm with optimal regret in a (near-)stationary environment into another algorithm with optimal dynamic regret in a non-stationary environment, importantly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Chen-Yu Wei , Haipeng Luo

We obtain essentially tight upper bounds for a strengthened notion of regret in the stochastic linear bandits framework. The strengthening -- referred to as Nash regret -- is defined as the difference between the (a priori unknown) optimum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Ayush Sawarni , Soumybrata Pal , Siddharth Barman

We study the best-arm identification problem in sparse linear bandits under the fixed-budget setting. In sparse linear bandits, the unknown feature vector $\theta^*$ may be of large dimension $d$, but only a few, say $s \ll d$ of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Recep Can Yavas , Vincent Y. F. Tan

Fast changing states or volatile environments pose a significant challenge to online optimization, which needs to perform rapid adaptation under limited observation. In this paper, we give query and regret optimal bandit algorithms under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Zhou Lu , Qiuyi Zhang , Xinyi Chen , Fred Zhang , David Woodruff , Elad Hazan

We study the Gaussian process (GP) bandit problem, whose goal is to minimize regret under an unknown reward function lying in some reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). The maximum posterior variance analysis is vital in analyzing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Shogo Iwazaki , Shion Takeno

We study the adversarial kernel bandit problem, in which the loss at each round is induced by an arbitrary bounded element of a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). We propose an exponential-weights algorithm built on a regularized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yu-Jie Zhang , Hao Qiu , Jonathan Scarlett , Kevin Jamieson

Recent works in bandit problems adopted lasso convergence theory in the sequential decision-making setting. Even with fully observed contexts, there are technical challenges that hinder the application of existing lasso convergence theory:…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-25 Byoungwook Jang , Julia Nepper , Marc Chevrette , Jo Handelsman , Alfred O. Hero

We study reinforcement learning for episodic Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) whose transitions are modelled by a multinomial logistic (MNL) model. Existing algorithms for MNL mixture MDPs yield a regret of $\smash{\tilde{O}(dH^2\sqrt{T})}$…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Pierre Boudart , Pierre Gaillard , Alessandro Rudi

Linear bandits have a wide variety of applications including recommendation systems yet they make one strong assumption: the algorithms must know an upper bound $S$ on the norm of the unknown parameter $\theta^*$ that governs the reward…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-05-04 Spencer , Gales , Sunder Sethuraman , Kwang-Sung Jun

We consider combinatorial semi-bandits over a set of arms ${\cal X} \subset \{0,1\}^d$ where rewards are uncorrelated across items. For this problem, the algorithm ESCB yields the smallest known regret bound $R(T) = {\cal O}\Big( {d (\ln…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-14 Thibaut Cuvelier , Richard Combes , Eric Gourdin

We prove an instance independent (poly) logarithmic regret for stochastic contextual bandits with linear payoff. Previously, in \cite{chu2011contextual}, a lower bound of $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ is shown for the contextual linear bandit…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-05-23 Avishek Ghosh , Abishek Sankararaman

We present a novel approach to address the multi-agent sparse contextual linear bandit problem, in which the feature vectors have a high dimension $d$ whereas the reward function depends on only a limited set of features - precisely $s_0…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Haniyeh Barghi , Xiaotong Cheng , Setareh Maghsudi

We revisit the challenge of designing online algorithms for the bandit convex optimization problem (BCO) which are also scalable to high dimensional problems. Hence, we consider algorithms that are \textit{projection-free}, i.e., based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-09 Dan Garber , Ben Kretzu

We consider the classical stochastic multi-armed bandit but where, from time to time and roughly with frequency $\epsilon$, an extra observation is gathered by the agent for free. We prove that, no matter how small $\epsilon$ is the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-11 Rémy Degenne , Evrard Garcelon , Vianney Perchet

The stochastic linear bandit problem proceeds in rounds where at each round the algorithm selects a vector from a decision set after which it receives a noisy linear loss parameterized by an unknown vector. The goal in such a problem is to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-21 Nicholas Johnson , Vidyashankar Sivakumar , Arindam Banerjee

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

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 the problem of online convex optimization (OCO) under unknown linear constraints that are either static, or stochastically time-varying. For this problem, we introduce an algorithm that we term Optimistically Safe OCO (OSOCO) and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Spencer Hutchinson , Tianyi Chen , Mahnoosh Alizadeh

We consider the setting of stochastic bandit problems with a continuum of arms. We first point out that the strategies considered so far in the literature only provided theoretical guarantees of the form: given some tuning parameters, the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2011-07-18 Sébastien Bubeck , Gilles Stoltz , Jia Yuan Yu

We introduce the first best-of-both-worlds algorithm for contextual combinatorial semi-bandits that simultaneously guarantees $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ regret in the adversarial regime and $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\ln T)$ regret…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-27 Mengmeng Li , Philipp J. Schneider , Jelisaveta Aleksić , Daniel Kuhn