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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…

Most contextual bandit algorithms minimize regret against the best fixed policy, a questionable benchmark for non-stationary environments that are ubiquitous in applications. In this work, we develop several efficient contextual bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-05 Haipeng Luo , Chen-Yu Wei , Alekh Agarwal , John Langford

Motivated by the principle of satisficing in decision-making, we study satisficing regret guarantees for nonstationary $K$-armed bandits. We show that in the general realizable, piecewise-stationary setting with $L$ stationary segments, the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-28 Yixuan Zhang , Ruihao Zhu , Qiaomin Xie

In this paper, we study the multi-objective bandits (MOB) problem, where a learner repeatedly selects one arm to play and then receives a reward vector consisting of multiple objectives. MOB has found many real-world applications as varied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Shiyin Lu , Guanghui Wang , Yao Hu , Lijun Zhang

We study nonparametric contextual bandits under batch constraints, where the expected reward for each action is modeled as a smooth function of covariates, and the policy updates are made at the end of each batch of observations. We…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-06 Rong Jiang , Cong Ma

Classic contextual bandit algorithms for linear models, such as LinUCB, assume that the reward distribution for an arm is modeled by a stationary linear regression. When the linear regression model is non-stationary over time, the regret of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-14 Qin Ding , Cho-Jui Hsieh , James Sharpnack

Traditional multi-armed bandit (MAB) frameworks, predominantly examined under stochastic or adversarial settings, often overlook the temporal dynamics inherent in many real-world applications such as recommendation systems and online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Qinyi Chen , Negin Golrezaei , Djallel Bouneffouf

We study the effect of persistence of engagement on learning in a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting. In advertising and recommendation systems, repetition effect includes a wear-in period, where the user's propensity to reward the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Priyank Agrawal , Theja Tulabandhula

We introduce the factored bandits model, which is a framework for learning with limited (bandit) feedback, where actions can be decomposed into a Cartesian product of atomic actions. Factored bandits incorporate rank-1 bandits as a special…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Julian Zimmert , Yevgeny Seldin

We propose the first contextual bandit algorithm that is parameter-free, efficient, and optimal in terms of dynamic regret. Specifically, our algorithm achieves dynamic regret $\mathcal{O}(\min\{\sqrt{ST},…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-19 Yifang Chen , Chung-Wei Lee , Haipeng Luo , Chen-Yu Wei

This paper explores a new form of the linear bandit problem in which the algorithm receives the usual stochastic rewards as well as stochastic feedback about which features are relevant to the rewards, the latter feedback being the novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-13 Urvashi Oswal , Aniruddha Bhargava , Robert Nowak

In the classic multi-armed bandits problem, the goal is to have a policy for dynamically operating arms that each yield stochastic rewards with unknown means. The key metric of interest is regret, defined as the gap between the expected…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2010-11-23 Yi Gai , Bhaskar Krishnamachari , Rahul Jain

This paper studies model-based bandit and reinforcement learning (RL) with nonlinear function approximations. We propose to study convergence to approximate local maxima because we show that global convergence is statistically intractable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-04 Kefan Dong , Jiaqi Yang , Tengyu Ma

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

Multi-armed bandit algorithms have become a reference solution for handling the explore/exploit dilemma in recommender systems, and many other important real-world problems, such as display advertisement. However, such algorithms usually…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-25 Qingyun Wu , Naveen Iyer , Hongning Wang

We study dynamic regret minimization in unconstrained adversarial linear bandit problems. In this setting, a learner must minimize the cumulative loss relative to an arbitrary sequence of comparators…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Alberto Rumi , Andrew Jacobsen , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Fabio Vitale

Reinforcement learning is an attractive approach to learn good resource allocation and scheduling policies based on data when the system model is unknown. However, the cumulative regret of most RL algorithms scales as $\tilde O(\mathsf{S}…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-28 Nima Akbarzadeh , Aditya Mahajan

We study how representation learning can improve the efficiency of bandit problems. We study the setting where we play $T$ linear bandits with dimension $d$ concurrently, and these $T$ bandit tasks share a common $k (\ll d)$ dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-06 Jiaqi Yang , Wei Hu , Jason D. Lee , Simon S. Du

We study stochastic linear bandits with heavy-tailed rewards, where the rewards have a finite $(1+\epsilon)$-absolute central moment bounded by $\upsilon$ for some $\epsilon \in (0,1]$. We improve both upper and lower bounds on the minimax…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Artin Tajdini , Jonathan Scarlett , Kevin Jamieson

We consider bandit problems involving a large (possibly infinite) collection of arms, in which the expected reward of each arm is a linear function of an $r$-dimensional random vector $\mathbf{Z} \in \mathbb{R}^r$, where $r \geq 2$. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2010-02-24 Paat Rusmevichientong , John N. Tsitsiklis