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We study the $K$-armed dueling bandit problem, a variation of the standard stochastic bandit problem where the feedback is limited to relative comparisons of a pair of arms. We introduce a tight asymptotic regret lower bound that is based…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-30 Junpei Komiyama , Junya Honda , Hisashi Kashima , Hiroshi Nakagawa

Thompson Sampling is one of the oldest heuristics for multi-armed bandit problems. It is a randomized algorithm based on Bayesian ideas, and has recently generated significant interest after several studies demonstrated it to have better…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-04 Shipra Agrawal , Navin Goyal

In the contextual pricing problem a seller repeatedly obtains products described by an adversarially chosen feature vector in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and only observes the purchasing decisions of a buyer with a fixed but unknown linear valuation…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-02-25 Allen Liu , Renato Paes Leme , Jon Schneider

We develop a model selection approach to tackle reinforcement learning with adversarial corruption in both transition and reward. For finite-horizon tabular MDPs, without prior knowledge on the total amount of corruption, our algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Chen-Yu Wei , Christoph Dann , Julian Zimmert

Policy regret is a well established notion of measuring the performance of an online learning algorithm against an adaptive adversary. We study restrictions on the adversary that enable efficient minimization of the \emph{complete policy…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-26 Dhruv Malik , Yuanzhi Li , Aarti Singh

We present a new algorithm for the contextual bandit learning problem, where the learner repeatedly takes one of $K$ actions in response to the observed context, and observes the reward only for that chosen action. Our method assumes access…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-10-15 Alekh Agarwal , Daniel Hsu , Satyen Kale , John Langford , Lihong Li , Robert E. Schapire

As sequential learning algorithms are increasingly applied to real life, ensuring data privacy while maintaining their utilities emerges as a timely question. In this context, regret minimisation in stochastic bandits under…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-12 Achraf Azize , Yulian Wu , Junya Honda , Francesco Orabona , Shinji Ito , Debabrota Basu

A recent work by Schlisselberg et al. (2024) studies a delay-as-payoff model for stochastic multi-armed bandits, where the payoff (either loss or reward) is delayed for a period that is proportional to the payoff itself. While this captures…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Mengxiao Zhang , Yingfei Wang , Haipeng Luo

In many bandit problems, the maximal reward achievable by a policy is often unknown in advance. We consider the problem of estimating the optimal policy value in the sublinear data regime before the optimal policy is even learnable. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Jonathan N. Lee , Weihao Kong , Aldo Pacchiano , Vidya Muthukumar , Emma Brunskill

We propose a simple model selection approach for algorithms in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. As opposed to prior work that (implicitly) assumes knowledge of the optimal regret, we only require that each base…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Aldo Pacchiano , Christoph Dann , Claudio Gentile , Peter Bartlett

We study finite-armed semiparametric bandits, where each arm's reward combines a linear component with an unknown, potentially adversarial shift. This model strictly generalizes classical linear bandits and reflects complexities common in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-18 Seok-Jin Kim , Gi-Soo Kim , Min-hwan Oh

We study the constrained variant of the \emph{multi-armed bandit} (MAB) problem, in which the learner aims not only at minimizing the total loss incurred during the learning dynamic, but also at controlling the violation of multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Francesco Emanuele Stradi , Kalana Kalupahana , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

In stochastic contextual bandits, an agent sequentially makes actions from a time-dependent action set based on past experience to minimize the cumulative regret. Like many other machine learning algorithms, the performance of bandits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Yue Kang , Cho-Jui Hsieh , Thomas C. M. Lee

While numerous works have focused on devising efficient algorithms for reinforcement learning (RL) with uniformly bounded rewards, it remains an open question whether sample or time-efficient algorithms for RL with large state-action space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Jiayi Huang , Han Zhong , Liwei Wang , Lin F. Yang

We use surrogate losses to obtain several new regret bounds and new algorithms for contextual bandit learning. Using the ramp loss, we derive new margin-based regret bounds in terms of standard sequential complexity measures of a benchmark…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-06 Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy

We consider the problem of contextual bandits where actions are subsets of a ground set and mean rewards are modeled by an unknown monotone submodular function that belongs to a class $\mathcal{F}$. We allow time-varying matroid constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Dean P. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin

Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning with KL-regularized objectives can enjoy faster rates of convergence or logarithmic regret, in contrast to the classical $\sqrt{T}$-type regret in the unregularized setting. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Kaixuan Ji , Qingyue Zhao , Heyang Zhao , Qiwei Di , Quanquan Gu

We study the stochastic linear bandit problem with multiple arms over $T$ rounds, where the covariate dimension $d$ may exceed $T$, but each arm-specific parameter vector is $s$-sparse. We begin by analyzing the sequential estimation…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-05-26 Jingyu Liu , Yanglei Song

Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) have shown that KL-regularization plays a pivotal role in improving the efficiency of RL fine-tuning for large language models (LLMs). Despite its empirical advantage, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Heyang Zhao , Chenlu Ye , Wei Xiong , Quanquan Gu , Tong Zhang

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