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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

Autonomous agents operating in sequential decision-making tasks under uncertainty can benefit from external action suggestions, which provide valuable guidance but inherently vary in reliability. Existing methods for incorporating such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Dylan M. Asmar , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

Policy gradients-based reinforcement learning has proven to be a promising approach for directly optimizing non-differentiable evaluation metrics for language generation tasks. However, optimizing for a specific metric reward leads to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-17 Ramakanth Pasunuru , Han Guo , Mohit Bansal

When developing reinforcement learning agents, the standard approach is to train an agent to converge to a fixed policy that is as close to optimal as possible for a single fixed reward function. If different agent behaviour is required in…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-01-29 David O'Callaghan , Patrick Mannion

We consider the stochastic linear (multi-armed) contextual bandit problem with the possibility of hidden simple multi-armed bandit structure in which the rewards are independent of the contextual information. Algorithms that are designed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-07 Niladri S. Chatterji , Vidya Muthukumar , Peter L. Bartlett

The Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem is challenging in non-stationary environments where reward distributions evolve dynamically. We introduce RAVEN-UCB, a novel algorithm that combines theoretical rigor with practical efficiency via…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Junyi Fang , Yuxun Chen , Yuxin Chen , Chen Zhang

We study incentivized exploration for the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem with non-stationary reward distributions, where players receive compensation for exploring arms other than the greedy choice and may provide biased feedback on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Sourav Chakraborty , Lijun Chen

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

Dynamic decisions are pivotal to economic policy making. We show how existing evidence from randomized control trials can be utilized to guide personalized decisions in challenging dynamic environments with budget and capacity constraints.…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-11-26 Karun Adusumilli , Friedrich Geiecke , Claudio Schilter

In many online decision processes, the optimizing agent is called to choose between large numbers of alternatives with many inherent similarities; in turn, these similarities imply closely correlated losses that may confound standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Matthieu Martin , Panayotis Mertikopoulos , Thibaud Rahier , Houssam Zenati

We consider the classic online learning and stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems, when at each step, the online policy can probe and find out which of a small number ($k$) of choices has better reward (or loss) before making its…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Aditya Bhaskara , Sreenivas Gollapudi , Sungjin Im , Kostas Kollias , Kamesh Munagala

In modern ML Ops environments, model deployment is a critical process that traditionally relies on static heuristics such as validation error comparisons and A/B testing. However, these methods require human intervention to adapt to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-31 S. Aaron McClendon , Vishaal Venkatesh , Juan Morinelli

Contextual bandits are widely used in industrial personalization systems. These online learning frameworks learn a treatment assignment policy in the presence of treatment effects that vary with the observed contextual features of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-11 Claudia Roberts , Maria Dimakopoulou , Qifeng Qiao , Ashok Chandrashekhar , Tony Jebara

It is well known that reinforcement learning can be cast as inference in an appropriate probabilistic model. However, this commonly involves introducing a distribution over agent trajectories with probabilities proportional to exponentiated…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-10-07 David Tolpin , Tomer Dobkin

Recent literature on online learning has focused on developing adaptive algorithms that take advantage of a regularity of the sequence of observations, yet retain worst-case performance guarantees. A complementary direction is to develop…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-01-27 Ali Jadbabaie , Alexander Rakhlin , Shahin Shahrampour , Karthik Sridharan

We study a class of adversarial bandit optimization problems in which the loss functions may be non-convex and non-smooth. In each round, the learner observes a loss that consists of an underlying linear component together with an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Zhuoyu Cheng , Kohei Hatano , Eiji Takimoto

We study the problem of reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon discounted linear Markov decision processes (MDPs), and propose the first computationally efficient algorithm achieving rate-optimal regret guarantees in this setting. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Antoine Moulin , Gergely Neu , Luca Viano

We study the problem of designing replication-proof bandit mechanisms when agents strategically register or replicate their own arms to maximize their payoff. Specifically, we consider Bayesian agents who only know the distribution from…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Suho Shin , Seyed A. Esmaeili , MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi

Real-world autonomous decision-making systems, from robots to recommendation engines, must operate in environments that change over time. While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown an impressive ability to learn optimal policies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Jonathan Clifford Balloch

We consider the restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problem with unknown dynamics in which a player chooses M out of N arms to play at each time. The reward state of each arm transits according to an unknown Markovian rule when it is played…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2011-12-30 Haoyang Liu , Keqin Liu , Qing Zhao