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Non-stationary multi-armed bandits enable agents to adapt to changing environments by incorporating mechanisms to detect and respond to shifts in reward distributions, making them well-suited for dynamic settings. However, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Shaoang Li , Jian Li

The celebrated multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory models the basic trade-off between exploration, or learning about the state of a system, and exploitation, or utilizing the system. In this paper we study the variant of the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2013-06-19 Sudipto Guha , Kamesh Munagala

We introduce the "inverse bandit" problem of estimating the rewards of a multi-armed bandit instance from observing the learning process of a low-regret demonstrator. Existing approaches to the related problem of inverse reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-23 Wenshuo Guo , Kumar Krishna Agrawal , Aditya Grover , Vidya Muthukumar , Ashwin Pananjady

We consider a multiobjective multiarmed bandit problem with lexicographically ordered objectives. In this problem, the goal of the learner is to select arms that are lexicographic optimal as much as possible without knowing the arm reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-30 Alihan Hüyük , Cem Tekin

Decision-making problems of sequential nature, where decisions made in the past may have an impact on the future, are used to model many practically important applications. In some real-world applications, feedback about a decision is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Ronald C. van den Broek , Rik Litjens , Tobias Sagis , Luc Siecker , Nina Verbeeke , Pratik Gajane

We study the challenging exploration incentive problem in both bandit and reinforcement learning, where the rewards are scale-free and potentially unbounded, driven by real-world scenarios and differing from existing work. Past works in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Mengfan Xu , Diego Klabjan

We present a formal model of human decision-making in explore-exploit tasks using the context of multi-armed bandit problems, where the decision-maker must choose among multiple options with uncertain rewards. We address the standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-23 Paul Reverdy , Vaibhav Srivastava , Naomi E. Leonard

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

We consider the correlated multiarmed bandit (MAB) problem in which the rewards associated with each arm are modeled by a multivariate Gaussian random variable, and we investigate the influence of the assumptions in the Bayesian prior on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-07-09 Vaibhav Srivastava , Paul Reverdy , Naomi Ehrich Leonard

In many real-world applications, multiple agents seek to learn how to perform highly related yet slightly different tasks in an online bandit learning protocol. We formulate this problem as the $\epsilon$-multi-player multi-armed bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-21 Zhi Wang , Chicheng Zhang , Manish Kumar Singh , Laurel D. Riek , Kamalika Chaudhuri

The Multiarmed Bandits (MAB) problem has been extensively studied and has seen many practical applications in a variety of fields. The Survival Multiarmed Bandits (S-MAB) open problem is an extension which constrains an agent to a budget…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Peter Veroutis , Frédéric Godin

Consider a requester who wishes to crowdsource a series of identical binary labeling tasks to a pool of workers so as to achieve an assured accuracy for each task, in a cost optimal way. The workers are heterogeneous with unknown but fixed…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-06-18 Shweta Jain , Sujit Gujar , Satyanath Bhat , Onno Zoeter , Y. Narahari

Online decision-making can be formulated as the popular stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where a learner makes decisions (or takes actions) to maximize cumulative rewards collected from an unknown environment. This paper proposes to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-26 Jonathan Gornet , Mehdi Hosseinzadeh , Bruno Sinopoli

In this paper, we investigate a new multi-armed bandit (MAB) online learning model that considers real-world phenomena in many recommender systems: (i) the learning agent cannot pull the arms by itself and thus has to offer rewards to users…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Tianchen Zhou , Jia Liu , Chaosheng Dong , Jingyuan Deng

We consider a scenario where an agent has multiple available strategies to explore an unknown environment. For each new interaction with the environment, the agent must select which exploration strategy to use. We provide a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-24 Fabien C. Y. Benureau , Pierre-Yves Oudeyer

Multi-armed bandits (MAB) are commonly used in sequential online decision-making when the reward of each decision is an unknown random variable. In practice however, the typical goal of maximizing total reward may be less important than…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Ishank Juneja , Carlee Joe-Wong , Osman Yağan

In this paper, we introduce a distributed version of the classical stochastic Multi-Arm Bandit (MAB) problem. Our setting consists of a large number of agents $n$ that collaboratively and simultaneously solve the same instance of $K$ armed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-06 Abishek Sankararaman , Ayalvadi Ganesh , Sanjay Shakkottai

We consider the classic online learning and stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems, when at each step, the online policy can probe and find out which of a small number ($k$) of choices has better reward (or loss) before making its…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Aditya Bhaskara , Sreenivas Gollapudi , Sungjin Im , Kostas Kollias , Kamesh Munagala

Online experimentation with interference is a common challenge in modern applications such as e-commerce and adaptive clinical trials in medicine. For example, in online marketplaces, the revenue of a good depends on discounts applied to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Abhineet Agarwal , Anish Agarwal , Lorenzo Masoero , Justin Whitehouse

We propose a novel algorithm for multi-player multi-armed bandits without collision sensing information. Our algorithm circumvents two problems shared by all state-of-the-art algorithms: it does not need as an input a lower bound on the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-07 Wei Huang , Richard Combes , Cindy Trinh