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Contextual bandits are a core technology for personalized mobile health interventions, where decision-making requires adapting to complex, non-linear user behaviors. While Thompson Sampling (TS) is a preferred strategy for these problems,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-10 Ruizhe Deng , Bibhas Chakraborty , Ran Chen , Yan Shuo Tan

Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning with KL-regularized objectives can enjoy faster rates of convergence or logarithmic regret, in contrast to the classical $\sqrt{T}$-type regret in the unregularized setting. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Kaixuan Ji , Qingyue Zhao , Heyang Zhao , Qiwei Di , Quanquan Gu

In federated multi-armed bandit problems, maximizing global reward while satisfying minimum privacy requirements to protect clients is the main goal. To formulate such problems, we consider a combinatorial contextual bandit setting with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Sepehr Elahi , Baran Atalar , Sevda Öğüt , Cem Tekin

We develop a novel and generic algorithm for the adversarial multi-armed bandit problem (or more generally the combinatorial semi-bandit problem). When instantiated differently, our algorithm achieves various new data-dependent regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-08 Chen-Yu Wei , Haipeng Luo

This paper introduces and addresses a wide class of stochastic bandit problems where the function mapping the arm to the corresponding reward exhibits some known structural properties. Most existing structures (e.g. linear, Lipschitz,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-02 Richard Combes , Stefan Magureanu , Alexandre Proutiere

Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithms are a widely-used class of sequential algorithms for the $K$-armed bandit problem. Despite extensive research over the past decades aimed at understanding their asymptotic and (near) minimax…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-12-10 Qiyang Han , Koulik Khamaru , Cun-Hui Zhang

We investigate the problem of stochastic, combinatorial multi-armed bandits where the learner only has access to bandit feedback and the reward function can be non-linear. We provide a general framework for adapting discrete offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Guanyu Nie , Yididiya Y Nadew , Yanhui Zhu , Vaneet Aggarwal , Christopher John Quinn

Thompson sampling (TS) is widely used in sequential decision making due to its ease of use and appealing empirical performance. However, many existing analytical and empirical results for TS rely on restrictive assumptions on reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Amin Karbasi , Nikki Lijing Kuang , Yi-An Ma , Siddharth Mitra

We study multi-armed bandit problems with graph feedback, in which the decision maker is allowed to observe the neighboring actions of the chosen action, in a setting where the graph may vary over time and is never fully revealed to the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-24 Fang Liu , Zizhan Zheng , Ness Shroff

Policy regret is a well established notion of measuring the performance of an online learning algorithm against an adaptive adversary. We study restrictions on the adversary that enable efficient minimization of the \emph{complete policy…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-26 Dhruv Malik , Yuanzhi Li , Aarti Singh

In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Ruohan Zhan , Susan Athey , Emma Brunskill

In this work, we study the performance of the Thompson Sampling algorithm for Contextual Bandit problems based on the framework introduced by Neu et al. and their concept of lifted information ratio. First, we prove a comprehensive bound on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-27 Amaury Gouverneur , Borja Rodríguez-Gálvez , Tobias J. Oechtering , Mikael Skoglund

Thompson Sampling, one of the oldest heuristics for solving multi-armed bandits, has recently been shown to demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. The empirical success has led to great interests in theoretical understanding of this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-10-29 Lihong Li

Dueling bandits is a prominent framework for decision-making involving preferential feedback, a valuable feature that fits various applications involving human interaction, such as ranking, information retrieval, and recommendation systems.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Qiwei Di , Tao Jin , Yue Wu , Heyang Zhao , Farzad Farnoud , Quanquan Gu

Motivated by problems in search and detection we present a solution to a Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit (CMAB) problem with both heavy-tailed reward distributions and a new class of feedback, filtered semibandit feedback. In a CMAB…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-29 James A. Grant , David S. Leslie , Kevin Glazebrook , Roberto Szechtman

Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) typically uses multi-armed bandit (MAB) strategies designed to minimize cumulative regret, such as UCB1, as its selection strategy. However, in the root node of the search tree, it is more sensible to minimize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Dominic Sagers , Mark H. M. Winands , Dennis J. N. J. Soemers

This paper investigates stochastic multi-armed bandit algorithms that are robust to adversarial attacks, where an attacker can first observe the learner's action and {then} alter their reward observation. We study two cases of this model,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Xuchuang Wang , Jinhang Zuo , Xutong Liu , John C. S. Lui , Mohammad Hajiesmaili

We consider a remote contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) problem, in which the decision-maker observes the context and the reward, but must communicate the actions to be taken by the agents over a rate-limited communication channel. This…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-02-11 Francesco Pase , Deniz Gunduz , Michele Zorzi

This paper studies the Bayesian regret of a variant of the Thompson-Sampling algorithm for bandit problems. It builds upon the information-theoretic framework of [Russo and Van Roy, 2015] and, more specifically, on the rate-distortion…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-07 Amaury Gouverneur , Borja Rodríguez-Gálvez , Tobias J. Oechtering , Mikael Skoglund

Originally motivated by default risk management applications, this paper investigates a novel problem, referred to as the profitable bandit problem here. At each step, an agent chooses a subset of the K possible actions. For each action…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-09 Mastane Achab , Stephan Clémençon , Aurélien Garivier