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We study the tail behavior of regret in stochastic multi-armed bandits for algorithms that are asymptotically optimal in expectation. While minimizing expected regret is the classical objective, recent work shows that even such algorithms…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Subhodip Panda , Shubhada Agrawal

This work addresses the problem of regret minimization in non-stochastic multi-armed bandit problems, focusing on performance guarantees that hold with high probability. Such results are rather scarce in the literature since proving them…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-11-04 Gergely Neu

Online reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) remains less theoretically and algorithmically developed than its episodic counterpart, with many algorithms suffering from high ``burn-in'' costs and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Guy Zamir , Matthew Zurek , Yudong Chen

We consider the infinite-horizon average-reward restless bandit problem. We propose a novel \emph{two-set policy} that maintains two dynamic subsets of arms: one subset of arms has a nearly optimal state distribution and takes actions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Yige Hong , Qiaomin Xie , Yudong Chen , Weina Wang

This paper is in the field of stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits (MABs), i.e. those sequential selection techniques able to learn online using only the feedback given by the chosen option (a.k.a. $arm$). We study a particular case of the rested…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-28 Marco Fiandri , Alberto Maria Metelli , Francesco Trov`o

We study the non-stationary stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, where the reward statistics of each arm may change several times during the course of learning. The performance of a learning algorithm is evaluated in terms of their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-09 Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Andras Gyorgy , Nevena Lazic

In this paper, we analyze the continuous armed bandit problems for nonconvex cost functions under certain smoothness and sublevel set assumptions. We first derive an upper bound on the expected cumulative regret of a simple bin splitting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-31 Puning Zhao , Lifeng Lai

We consider the question introduced by \cite{Mason2020} of identifying all the $\varepsilon$-optimal arms in a finite stochastic multi-armed bandit with Gaussian rewards. We give two lower bounds on the sample complexity of any algorithm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-07 Aymen Al Marjani , Tomáš Kocák , Aurélien Garivier

We study a sequential decision problem where the learner faces a sequence of $K$-armed bandit tasks. The task boundaries might be known (the bandit meta-learning setting), or unknown (the non-stationary bandit setting). For a given integer…

We consider restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) with a finite horizon and multiple pulls per period. Leveraging the Lagrangian relaxation, we approximate the problem with a collection of single arm problems. We then propose an index-based…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-07-04 Weici Hu , Peter Frazier

Regret minimization in streaming multi-armed bandits (MABs) has been studied extensively in recent years. In the single-pass setting with $K$ arms and $T$ trials, a regret lower bound of $\Omega(T^{2/3})$ has been proved for any algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Chen Wang

We investigate the regret-minimisation problem in a multi-armed bandit setting with arbitrary corruptions. Similar to the classical setup, the agent receives rewards generated independently from the distribution of the arm chosen at each…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-09-29 Shubhada Agrawal , Timothée Mathieu , Debabrota Basu , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard

We consider a variant of the best arm identification (BAI) problem in multi-armed bandits (MAB) in which there are two sets of arms (source and target), and the objective is to determine the best target arm while only pulling source arms.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-09 Ojash Neopane , Aaditya Ramdas , Aarti Singh

We consider the classical stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with a constraint that limits the total cost incurred by switching between actions to be no larger than a given switching budget. For this problem, we prove matching upper and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-22 David Simchi-Levi , Yunzong Xu

We propose a new strategy for best-arm identification with fixed confidence of Gaussian variables with bounded means and unit variance. This strategy, called Exploration-Biased Sampling, is not only asymptotically optimal: it is to the best…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-03-08 Antoine Barrier , Aurélien Garivier , Tomáš Kocák

We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem motivated by ``large'' action spaces, and endowed with a population of arms containing exactly $K$ arm-types, each characterized by a distinct mean reward. The decision maker is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-19 Anand Kalvit , Assaf Zeevi

We investigate the stochastic Thresholding Bandit problem (TBP) under several shape constraints. On top of (i) the vanilla, unstructured TBP, we consider the case where (ii) the sequence of arm's means $(\mu_k)_k$ is monotonically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 James Cheshire , Pierre Menard , Alexandra Carpentier

Motivated by the concept of satisficing in decision-making, we consider the problem of satisficing regret minimization in bandit optimization. In this setting, the learner aims at selecting satisficing arms (arms with mean reward exceeding…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-01 Qing Feng , Tianyi Ma , Ruihao Zhu

We study stochastic structured bandits for minimizing regret. The fact that the popular optimistic algorithms do not achieve the asymptotic instance-dependent regret optimality (asymptotic optimality for short) has recently alluded…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Kwang-Sung Jun , Chicheng Zhang

This paper presents a new approach for batch Bayesian Optimization (BO) called Thompson Sampling-Regret to Sigma Ratio directed sampling (TS-RSR), where we sample a new batch of actions by minimizing a Thompson Sampling approximation of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Zhaolin Ren , Na Li