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A standard way to obtain convergence guarantees in stochastic convex optimization is to run an online learning algorithm and then output the average of its iterates: the actual iterates of the online learning algorithm do not come with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-05 Ashok Cutkosky

In this work, we develop linear bandit algorithms that automatically adapt to different environments. By plugging a novel loss estimator into the optimization problem that characterizes the instance-optimal strategy, our first algorithm not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Chung-Wei Lee , Haipeng Luo , Chen-Yu Wei , Mengxiao Zhang , Xiaojin Zhang

Smoothed online combinatorial optimization considers a learner who repeatedly chooses a combinatorial decision to minimize an unknown changing cost function with a penalty on switching decisions in consecutive rounds. We study smoothed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Kai Wang , Zhao Song , Georgios Theocharous , Sridhar Mahadevan

Stochastic dominance is a technique for evaluating the performance of online algorithms that provides an intuitive, yet powerful stochastic order between the compared algorithms. Accordingly this holds for bijective analysis, which can be…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-07-22 Spyros Angelopoulos , Marc P. Renault , Pascal Schweitzer

In this paper, we address the stochastic contextual linear bandit problem, where a decision maker is provided a context (a random set of actions drawn from a distribution). The expected reward of each action is specified by the inner…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-30 Osama A. Hanna , Lin F. Yang , Christina Fragouli

A stochastic combinatorial semi-bandit is an online learning problem where at each step a learning agent chooses a subset of ground items subject to combinatorial constraints, and then observes stochastic weights of these items and receives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-01 Zheng Wen , Branislav Kveton , Azin Ashkan

Optimization theory has been widely studied in academia and finds a large variety of applications in industry. The different optimization models in their discrete and/or continuous settings have catered to a rich source of research…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-16 Debbie Lim , Joao F. Doriguello , Patrick Rebentrost

Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving many real-world interactive machine learning problems. Despite multiple recent successes on statistically and computationally efficient methods, the practical behavior of these…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-08 Alberto Bietti , Alekh Agarwal , John Langford

A latent bandit problem is one in which the learning agent knows the arm reward distributions conditioned on an unknown discrete latent state. The primary goal of the agent is to identify the latent state, after which it can act optimally.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-17 Joey Hong , Branislav Kveton , Manzil Zaheer , Yinlam Chow , Amr Ahmed , Craig Boutilier

Best-of-both-worlds algorithms for online learning which achieve near-optimal regret in both the adversarial and the stochastic regimes have received growing attention recently. Existing techniques often require careful adaptation to every…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Christoph Dann , Chen-Yu Wei , Julian Zimmert

Multi-objective combinatorial optimization seeks Pareto-optimal solutions over exponentially large discrete spaces, yet existing methods sacrifice generality, scalability, or theoretical guarantees. We reformulate it as an online learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Esha Singh , Dongxia Wu , Chien-Yi Yang , Tajana Rosing , Rose Yu , Yi-An Ma

This paper studies semiparametric contextual bandits, a generalization of the linear stochastic bandit problem where the reward for an action is modeled as a linear function of known action features confounded by an non-linear…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-17 Akshay Krishnamurthy , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Vasilis Syrgkanis

We study contextual stochastic optimization problems, where we leverage rich auxiliary observations (e.g., product characteristics) to improve decision making with uncertain variables (e.g., demand). We show how to train forest decision…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-17 Nathan Kallus , Xiaojie Mao

We consider the contextual bandit problem where at each time, the agent only has access to a noisy version of the context and the error variance (or an estimator of this variance). This setting is motivated by a wide range of applications…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-19 Yongyi Guo , Ziping Xu , Susan Murphy

Stochastic optimization finds a wide range of applications in operations research and management science. However, existing stochastic optimization techniques usually require the information of random samples (e.g., demands in the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-04-18 Xi Chen , Qihang Lin , Zizhuo Wang

A stochastic combinatorial semi-bandit is an online learning problem where at each step a learning agent chooses a subset of ground items subject to constraints, and then observes stochastic weights of these items and receives their sum as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-08 Branislav Kveton , Zheng Wen , Azin Ashkan , Csaba Szepesvari

This paper addresses the critical challenge of stochastic latent heterogeneity in online decision-making, where individuals' responses to actions vary not only with observable contexts but also with unobserved, randomly realized subgroups.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Elynn Chen , Xi Chen , Wenbo Jing , Xiao Liu

We present prior robust algorithms for a large class of resource allocation problems where requests arrive one-by-one (online), drawn independently from an unknown distribution at every step. We design a single algorithm that, for every…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-03-12 Nikhil R. Devanur , Kamal Jain , Balasubramanian Sivan , Christopher A. Wilkens

We introduce algorithms that achieve state-of-the-art \emph{dynamic regret} bounds for non-stationary linear stochastic bandit setting. It captures natural applications such as dynamic pricing and ads allocation in a changing environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Wang Chi Cheung , David Simchi-Levi , Ruihao Zhu

What can an agent learn in a stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem from a dataset that contains just a single sample for each arm? Surprisingly, in this work, we demonstrate that even in such a data-starved setting it may still be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Ruiqi Zhang , Yuexiang Zhai , Andrea Zanette