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Psychological research shows that enjoyment of many goods is subject to satiation, with short-term satisfaction declining after repeated exposures to the same item. Nevertheless, proposed algorithms for powering recommender systems seldom…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Liu Leqi , Fatma Kilinc-Karzan , Zachary C. Lipton , Alan L. Montgomery

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

We propose a multi-agent multi-armed bandit (MA-MAB) framework aimed at ensuring fair outcomes across agents while maximizing overall system performance. A key challenge in this setting is decision-making under limited information about arm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Tianyi Xu , Jiaxin Liu , Nicholas Mattei , Zizhan Zheng

Sequential decision-making under uncertainty often involves multiple agents learning which actions (arms) yield the highest rewards through repeated interaction with a stochastic environment. This setting is commonly modeled by cooperative…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-25 Evagoras Makridis , Themistoklis Charalambous

We consider the best arm identification (BAI) problem in the $K-$armed bandit framework with a modification - the agent is allowed to play a subset of arms at each time slot instead of one arm. Consequently, the agent observes the sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Siddhartha Parupudi , Gourab Ghatak

Contextual bandits can solve a huge range of real-world problems. However, current popular algorithms to solve them either rely on linear models, or unreliable uncertainty estimation in non-linear models, which are required to deal with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Adam Elwood , Marco Leonardi , Ashraf Mohamed , Alessandro Rozza

We seek to take a different approach in deriving the optimal search policy for the repeated consumer search model found in Fishman and Rob (1995) with the main motivation of dropping the assumption of prior knowledge of the price…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-12-24 Tung Yu Marco Chan

The ability to explore efficiently and effectively is a central challenge of reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider exploration through the lens of information theory. Specifically, we cast exploration as a problem of maximizing…

For the model of constrained multi-armed bandit, we show that by construction there exists an index-based deterministic asymptotically optimal algorithm. The optimality is achieved by the convergence of the probability of choosing an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-30 Hyeong Soo Chang

This paper studies a multi-armed bandit (MAB) version of the range-searching problem. In its basic form, range searching considers as input a set of points (on the real line) and a collection of (real) intervals. Here, with each specified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-05 Siddharth Barman , Ramakrishnan Krishnamurthy , Saladi Rahul

Decision trees, without appropriate constraints, can easily become overly complex and prone to overfit, capturing noise rather than generalizable patterns. To resolve this problem,pruning operation is a crucial part in optimizing decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Hasibul Karim Shanto , Umme Ayman Koana , Shadikur Rahman

The best arm identification problem in the multi-armed bandit setting is an excellent model of many real-world decision-making problems, yet it fails to capture the fact that in the real-world, safety constraints often must be met while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-25 Zhenlin Wang , Andrew Wagenmaker , Kevin Jamieson

We consider a novel stochastic multi-armed bandit problem called {\em good arm identification} (GAI), where a good arm is defined as an arm with expected reward greater than or equal to a given threshold. GAI is a pure-exploration problem…

In multi-objective decision-making with hierarchical preferences, lexicographic bandits provide a natural framework for optimizing multiple objectives in a prioritized order. In this setting, a learner repeatedly selects arms and observes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Bo Xue , Yuanyu Wan , Zhichao Lu , Qingfu Zhang

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

The dynamic allocation problem, also known as the `multi-armed bandit' problem, simulates a situation in which an agent is faced with a tradeoff between actions that yield an immediate reward and actions whose benefits can only be perceived…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-02-03 Christopher Wang

This paper studies a sequential decision problem where payoff distributions are known and where the riskiness of payoffs matters. Equivalently, it studies sequential choice from a repeated set of independent lotteries. The decision-maker is…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-01-02 Zengjing Chen , Larry G. Epstein , Guodong Zhang

Pure exploration is one of the fundamental problems in multi-armed bandits (MAB). However, existing works mostly focus on specific pure exploration tasks, without a holistic view of the general pure exploration problem. This work fills this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-12 Di Wu , Chengshuai Shi , Ruida Zhou , Cong Shen

We consider a constrained, pure exploration, stochastic multi-armed bandit formulation under a fixed budget. Each arm is associated with an unknown, possibly multi-dimensional distribution and is described by multiple attributes that are a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Fathima Zarin Faizal , Jayakrishnan Nair

We study the federated pure exploration problem of multi-armed bandits and linear bandits, where $M$ agents cooperatively identify the best arm via communicating with the central server. To enhance the robustness against latency and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Zichen Wang , Chuanhao Li , Chenyu Song , Lianghui Wang , Quanquan Gu , Huazheng Wang