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Related papers: Forced Exploration in Bandit Problems

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Multi-armed bandit problems are considered as a paradigm of the trade-off between exploring the environment to find profitable actions and exploiting what is already known. In the stationary case, the distributions of the rewards do not…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2008-12-18 Aurélien Garivier , Eric Moulines

Despite the great interest in the bandit problem, designing efficient algorithms for complex models remains challenging, as there is typically no analytical way to quantify uncertainty. In this paper, we propose Multiplier Bootstrap-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Runzhe Wan , Haoyu Wei , Branislav Kveton , Rui Song

We study the nonstationary stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem in which the distribution of rewards associated with each arm are assumed to be time-varying and the total variation in the expected rewards is subject to a variation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-25 Lai Wei , Vaibhav Srivastava

In this paper, we consider a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, MAB with cost subsidy, which models many real-life applications where the learning agent has to pay to select an arm and is concerned about optimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Deeksha Sinha , Karthik Abinav Sankararama , Abbas Kazerouni , Vashist Avadhanula

The Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) framework highlights the tension between acquiring new knowledge (Exploration) and leveraging available knowledge (Exploitation). In the classical MAB problem, a decision maker must choose an arm at each time…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-03 Nir Levine , Koby Crammer , Shie Mannor

We study the stochastic Multiplayer Multi-Armed Bandit (MMAB) problem, where multiple players select arms to maximize their cumulative rewards. Collisions occur when two or more players select the same arm, resulting in no reward, and are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Daoyuan Zhou , Xuchuang Wang , Lin Yang , Yang Gao

Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) algorithms are widely used in recommender systems that require continuous, incremental learning. A core aspect of MABs is the exploration-exploitation trade-off: choosing between exploiting items likely to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Pedro R. Pires , Gregorio F. Azevedo , Pietro L. Campos , Rafael T. Sereicikas , Tiago A. Almeida

Multi-armed bandit problems are the most basic examples of sequential decision problems with an exploration-exploitation trade-off. This is the balance between staying with the option that gave highest payoffs in the past and exploring new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-11-06 Sébastien Bubeck , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

We study the stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem under worst-case regret and heavy-tailed reward distribution. We modify the minimax policy MOSS for the sub-Gaussian reward distribution by using saturated empirical mean to design a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-19 Lai Wei , Vaibhav Srivastava

In this paper, we consider a new Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem where arms are nodes in an unknown and possibly changing graph, and the agent (i) initiates random walks over the graph by pulling arms, (ii) observes the random walk…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Tianyu Wang , Lin F. Yang , Zizhuo Wang

We define a general framework for a large class of combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) problems, where subsets of base arms with unknown distributions form super arms. In each round, a super arm is played and the base arms contained in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-30 Wei Chen , Yajun Wang , Yang Yuan , Qinshi Wang

We study incentivized exploration in multi-armed bandit (MAB) settings with infinitely many arms modeled as elements in continuous metric spaces. Unlike classical bandit models, we consider scenarios where the decision-maker (principal)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Sourav Chakraborty , Amit Kiran Rege , Claire Monteleoni , Lijun Chen

The problem of multi-armed bandits (MAB) asks to make sequential decisions while balancing between exploitation and exploration, and have been successfully applied to a wide range of practical scenarios. Various algorithms have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Xiaojin Zhang , Shuai Li , Weiwen Liu , Shengyu Zhang

Contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms have been shown promising for maximizing cumulative rewards in sequential decision tasks such as news article recommendation systems, web page ad placement algorithms, and mobile health.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-01 Gi-Soo Kim , Myunghee Cho Paik

We study the non-stationary stochastic multiarmed bandit (MAB) problem and propose two generic algorithms, namely, the limited memory deterministic sequencing of exploration and exploitation (LM-DSEE) and the Sliding-Window Upper Confidence…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-04-25 Lai Wei , Vaibhav Srivastava

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

Multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a widely adopted framework for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. Traditional bandit algorithms rely solely on online data, which tends to be scarce as it must be gathered during the online phase when…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Wenlong Ji , Yihan Pan , Ruihao Zhu , Lihua Lei

This paper introduces the framework of multi-armed sampling, which serves as the sampling counterpart to the optimization problem of multi-armed bandits. Our primary motivation is to rigorously examine the exploration-exploitation trade-off…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Mohammad Pedramfar , Siamak Ravanbakhsh

Pure exploration in multi-armed bandits has emerged as an important framework for modeling decision-making and search under uncertainty. In modern applications, however, one is often faced with a tremendously large number of options. Even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Parth K. Thaker , Mohit Malu , Nikhil Rao , Gautam Dasarathy

The Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem is challenging in non-stationary environments where reward distributions evolve dynamically. We introduce RAVEN-UCB, a novel algorithm that combines theoretical rigor with practical efficiency via…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Junyi Fang , Yuxun Chen , Yuxin Chen , Chen Zhang