English
Related papers

Related papers: Multi-Armed Bandits with Self-Information Rewards

200 papers

We study a distributed multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem over arm erasure channels, motivated by the increasing adoption of MAB algorithms over communication-constrained networks. In this setup, the learner communicates the chosen arm to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Merve Karakas , Osama Hanna , Lin F. Yang , Christina Fragouli

It is well known that in stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB), the sample mean of an arm is typically not an unbiased estimator of its true mean. In this paper, we decouple three different sources of this selection bias: adaptive…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-10-29 Jaehyeok Shin , Aaditya Ramdas , Alessandro Rinaldo

Algorithms for the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem play a central role in sequential decision-making and have been extensively explored both theoretically and numerically. While most classical approaches aim to identify the arm with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Gabriel Turinici

In this paper, we propose a Thompson Sampling algorithm for \emph{unimodal} bandits, where the expected reward is unimodal over the partially ordered arms. To exploit the unimodal structure better, at each step, instead of exploration from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-17 Long Yang , Zhao Li , Zehong Hu , Shasha Ruan , Shijian Li , Gang Pan , Hongyang Chen

We propose a novel algorithm for multi-player multi-armed bandits without collision sensing information. Our algorithm circumvents two problems shared by all state-of-the-art algorithms: it does not need as an input a lower bound on the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-07 Wei Huang , Richard Combes , Cindy Trinh

We consider a novel stochastic multi-armed bandit setting, where playing an arm makes it unavailable for a fixed number of time slots thereafter. This models situations where reusing an arm too often is undesirable (e.g. making the same…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Soumya Basu , Rajat Sen , Sujay Sanghavi , Sanjay Shakkottai

We study the problem of selecting $K$ arms with the highest expected rewards in a stochastic $n$-armed bandit game. This problem has a wide range of applications, e.g., A/B testing, crowdsourcing, simulation optimization. Our goal is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-06 Jiecao Chen , Xi Chen , Qin Zhang , Yuan Zhou

Classical multi-armed bandit problems use the expected value of an arm as a metric to evaluate its goodness. However, the expected value is a risk-neutral metric. In many applications like finance, one is interested in balancing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Anmol Kagrecha , Jayakrishnan Nair , Krishna Jagannathan

We study an interesting variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, called the Fair-SMAB problem, where each arm is required to be pulled for at least a given fraction of the total available rounds. We investigate the interplay…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-06 Vishakha Patil , Ganesh Ghalme , Vineet Nair , Y. Narahari

In a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, an online algorithm makes a sequence of choices. In each round it chooses from a time-invariant set of alternatives and receives the payoff associated with this alternative. While the case of small…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2014-05-21 Aleksandrs Slivkins

We study the problem of information sharing and cooperation in Multi-Player Multi-Armed bandits. We propose the first algorithm that achieves logarithmic regret for this problem when the collision reward is unknown. Our results are based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Aldo Pacchiano , Peter Bartlett , Michael I. Jordan

We consider a finite-armed structured bandit problem in which mean rewards of different arms are known functions of a common hidden parameter $\theta^*$. Since we do not place any restrictions of these functions, the problem setting…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-04 Samarth Gupta , Shreyas Chaudhari , Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Gauri Joshi , Osman Yağan

We study a distributed stochastic multi-armed bandit where a client supplies the learner with communication-constrained feedback based on the rewards for the corresponding arm pulls. In our setup, the client must encode the rewards such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Prathamesh Mayekar , Jonathan Scarlett , Vincent Y. F. Tan

In this paper, we propose a new multi-objective contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem with two objectives, where one of the objectives dominates the other objective. Unlike single-objective MAB problems in which the learner obtains a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-04 Cem Tekin , Eralp Turgay

The problem of bandit with graph feedback generalizes both the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem and the learning with expert advice problem by encoding in a directed graph how the loss vector can be observed in each round of the game. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-07 Yuchen He , Chihao Zhang

Sequential experiments are often characterized by an exploration-exploitation tradeoff that is captured by the multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework. This framework has been studied and applied, typically when at each time period feedback is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-22 Yonatan Gur , Ahmadreza Momeni

We introduce the "inverse bandit" problem of estimating the rewards of a multi-armed bandit instance from observing the learning process of a low-regret demonstrator. Existing approaches to the related problem of inverse reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-23 Wenshuo Guo , Kumar Krishna Agrawal , Aditya Grover , Vidya Muthukumar , Ashwin Pananjady

We consider a novel multi-arm bandit (MAB) setup, where a learner needs to communicate the actions to distributed agents over erasure channels, while the rewards for the actions are directly available to the learner through external…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-27 Osama Hanna , Merve Karakas , Lin F. Yang , Christina Fragouli

We study private and robust multi-armed bandits (MABs), where the agent receives Huber's contaminated heavy-tailed rewards and meanwhile needs to ensure differential privacy. We first present its minimax lower bound, characterizing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Yulian Wu , Xingyu Zhou , Youming Tao , Di Wang

We study replicable algorithms for stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB) and linear bandits with UCB (Upper Confidence Bound) based exploration. A bandit algorithm is $\rho$-replicable if two executions using shared internal randomness but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Rohan Deb , Udaya Ghai , Karan Singh , Arindam Banerjee