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Motivated by online recommendation systems, we propose the problem of finding the optimal policy in multitask contextual bandits when a small fraction $\alpha < 1/2$ of tasks (users) are arbitrary and adversarial. The remaining fraction of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Jeongyeol Kwon , Yonathan Efroni , Constantine Caramanis , Shie Mannor

We present an online tutoring system that learns to provide effective feedback to students after they answer questions incorrectly. Using data from one million students, the system learns which assistance action (e.g., one of multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-04 Robin Schmucker , Nimish Pachapurkar , Shanmuga Bala , Miral Shah , Tom Mitchell

We consider a sequential assortment selection problem where the user choice is given by a multinomial logit (MNL) choice model whose parameters are unknown. In each period, the learning agent observes a $d$-dimensional contextual…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-26 Min-hwan Oh , Garud Iyengar

This work leverages adaptive social learning to estimate partially observable global states in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) problems. Unlike existing methods, the proposed approach enables the concurrent operation of social…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Ainur Zhaikhan , Malek Khammassi , Ali H. Sayed

The multi-armed bandit problem is a core framework for sequential decision-making under uncertainty, but classical algorithms often fail in environments with hidden, time-varying states that confound reward estimation and optimal action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Jikai Jin , Kenneth Hung , Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Baoyi Shi , Congshan Zhang

We consider a contextual bandit problem with $S$ contexts and $K$ actions. In each round $t=1,2,\dots$, the learner observes a random context and chooses an action based on its past experience. The learner then observes a random reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-29 Chung-Wei Lee , Qinghua Liu , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Chi Jin , Tor Lattimore , Csaba Szepesvári

In this paper, we consider the contextual variant of the MNL-Bandit problem. More specifically, we consider a dynamic set optimization problem, where a decision-maker offers a subset (assortment) of products to a consumer and observes the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Priyank Agrawal , Theja Tulabandhula , Vashist Avadhanula

Many interesting real world domains involve reinforcement learning (RL) in partially observable environments. Efficient learning in such domains is important, but existing sample complexity bounds for partially observable RL are at least…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-02 Zhaohan Daniel Guo , Shayan Doroudi , Emma Brunskill

Contextual bandits are a form of multi-armed bandit in which the agent has access to predictive side information (known as the context) for each arm at each time step, and have been used to model personalized news recommendation, ad…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-05-25 Aniket Anand Deshmukh , Urun Dogan , Clayton Scott

Episodic reinforcement learning and contextual bandits are two widely studied sequential decision-making problems. Episodic reinforcement learning generalizes contextual bandits and is often perceived to be more difficult due to long…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-01 Zihan Zhang , Xiangyang Ji , Simon S. Du

Restless bandit problems are instances of non-stationary multi-armed bandits. These problems have been studied well from the optimization perspective, where the goal is to efficiently find a near-optimal policy when system parameters are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Young Hun Jung , Ambuj Tewari

In the stochastic linear contextual bandit setting there exist several minimax procedures for exploration with policies that are reactive to the data being acquired. In practice, there can be a significant engineering overhead to deploy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-26 Andrea Zanette , Kefan Dong , Jonathan Lee , Emma Brunskill

Multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a class of online learning problems where a learning agent aims to maximize its expected cumulative reward while repeatedly selecting to pull arms with unknown reward distributions. We consider a scenario where…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-25 Yang Cao , Zheng Wen , Branislav Kveton , Yao Xie

Many interventions, such as vaccines in clinical trials or coupons in online marketplaces, must be assigned sequentially without full knowledge of their effects. Multi-armed bandit algorithms have proven successful in such settings.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-07 Aidan Gleich , Eric Laber , Alexander Volfovsky

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

We present the first high-probability optimal regret bound for a policy optimization technique applied to the problem of stochastic contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) with general offline function approximation. Our algorithm is both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Orin Levy , Yishay Mansour

Controlling antenna tilts in cellular networks is imperative to reach an efficient trade-off between network coverage and capacity. In this paper, we devise algorithms learning optimal tilt control policies from existing data (in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-07 Filippo Vannella , Alexandre Proutiere , Yassir Jedra , Jaeseong Jeong

We study the constrained variant of the \emph{multi-armed bandit} (MAB) problem, in which the learner aims not only at minimizing the total loss incurred during the learning dynamic, but also at controlling the violation of multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Francesco Emanuele Stradi , Kalana Kalupahana , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

Motivated by practical needs such as large-scale learning, we study the impact of adaptivity constraints to linear contextual bandits, a central problem in online active learning. We consider two popular limited adaptivity models in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-26 Yufei Ruan , Jiaqi Yang , Yuan Zhou

We consider imitation learning problems where the learner's ability to mimic the expert increases throughout the course of an episode as more information is revealed. One example of this is when the expert has access to privileged…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Gokul Swamy , Sanjiban Choudhury , J. Andrew Bagnell , Zhiwei Steven Wu