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Contextual bandits are incredibly useful in many practical problems. We go one step further by devising a more realistic problem that combines: (1) contextual bandits with dense arm features, (2) non-linear reward functions, and (3) a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Wei Min Loh , Sajib Kumer Sinha , Ankur Agarwal , Pascal Poupart

In repeated interaction problems with adaptive agents, our objective often requires anticipating and optimizing over the space of possible agent responses. We show that many problems of this form can be cast as instances of online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-28 William Brown , Christos Papadimitriou , Tim Roughgarden

We study the linear contextual bandit problem in the presence of adversarial corruption, where the interaction between the player and a possibly infinite decision set is contaminated by an adversary that can corrupt the reward up to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Heyang Zhao , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

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

We consider the stochastic linear (multi-armed) contextual bandit problem with the possibility of hidden simple multi-armed bandit structure in which the rewards are independent of the contextual information. Algorithms that are designed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-07 Niladri S. Chatterji , Vidya Muthukumar , Peter L. Bartlett

We explore whether quantum advantages can be found for the zeroth-order online convex optimization problem, which is also known as bandit convex optimization with multi-point feedback. In this setting, given access to zeroth-order oracles…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-04-04 Jianhao He , Feidiao Yang , Jialin Zhang , Lvzhou Li

Typical contextual bandit algorithms assume that the rewards at each round lie in some fixed range $[0, R]$, and their regret scales polynomially with this reward range $R$. However, many practical scenarios naturally involve heavy-tailed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-05 Chenlu Ye , Yujia Jin , Alekh Agarwal , Tong Zhang

We study the problem of stochastic contextual bandits in the agnostic setting, where the goal is to compete with the best policy in a given class without assuming realizability or imposing model restrictions on losses or rewards. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-06 Samuel Girard , Aurelien Bibaut , Arthur Gretton , Nathan Kallus , Houssam Zenati

Hu and Mehta (2024) posed an open problem: what is the optimal instance-dependent rate for the stochastic decision-theoretic online learning (with $K$ actions and $T$ rounds) under $\varepsilon$-differential privacy? Before, the best known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Ruihan Wu , Yu-Xiang Wang

We study best-of-both-worlds algorithms for $K$-armed linear contextual bandits. Our algorithms deliver near-optimal regret bounds in both the adversarial and stochastic regimes, without prior knowledge about the environment. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Yuko Kuroki , Alberto Rumi , Taira Tsuchiya , Fabio Vitale , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

We present an algorithm that achieves almost optimal pseudo-regret bounds against adversarial and stochastic bandits. Against adversarial bandits the pseudo-regret is $O(K\sqrt{n \log n})$ and against stochastic bandits the pseudo-regret is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-30 Peter Auer , Chao-Kai Chiang

Offline policy learning (OPL) leverages existing data collected a priori for policy optimization without any active exploration. Despite the prevalence and recent interest in this problem, its theoretical and algorithmic foundations in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Sunil Gupta , A. Tuan Nguyen , Svetha Venkatesh

We study a novel setting in offline reinforcement learning (RL) where a number of distributed machines jointly cooperate to solve the problem but only one single round of communication is allowed and there is a budget constraint on the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-11 Juliusz Krysztof Ziomek , Jun Wang , Yaodong Yang

For infinite action contextual bandits, smoothed regret and reduction to regression results in state-of-the-art online performance with computational cost independent of the action set: unfortunately, the resulting data exhaust does not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Mark Rucker , Yinglun Zhu , Paul Mineiro

We investigate the sparse linear contextual bandit problem where the parameter $\theta$ is sparse. To relieve the sampling inefficiency, we utilize the "perturbed adversary" where the context is generated adversarilly but with small random…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-20 Zhiyuan Liu , Huazheng Wang , Bo Waggoner , Youjian , Liu , Lijun Chen

Contextual bandit algorithms often estimate reward models to inform decision-making. However, true rewards can contain action-independent redundancies that are not relevant for decision-making. We show it is more data-efficient to estimate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-27 Aldo Gael Carranza , Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Susan Athey

We study the problem of online learning and online regret minimization when samples are drawn from a general unknown non-stationary process. We introduce the concept of a dynamic changing process with cost $K$, where the conditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Changlong Wu , Ananth Grama , Wojciech Szpankowski

We study the optimal batch-regret tradeoff for batch linear contextual bandits. For any batch number $M$, number of actions $K$, time horizon $T$, and dimension $d$, we provide an algorithm and prove its regret guarantee, which, due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Zihan Zhang , Xiangyang Ji , Yuan Zhou

We study the problem of \emph{dynamic regret minimization} in $K$-armed Dueling Bandits under non-stationary or time varying preferences. This is an online learning setup where the agent chooses a pair of items at each round and observes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Aadirupa Saha , Shubham Gupta

We study a variant of online convex optimization where the player is permitted to switch decisions at most $S$ times in expectation throughout $T$ rounds. Similar problems have been addressed in prior work for the discrete decision set…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Uri Sherman , Tomer Koren