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We study the problem of learning in zero-sum matrix games with repeated play and bandit feedback. Specifically, we focus on developing uncoupled algorithms that guarantee, without communication between players, the convergence of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Côme Fiegel , Pierre Ménard , Tadashi Kozuno , Michal Valko , Vianney Perchet

Smooth functions on graphs have wide applications in manifold and semi-supervised learning. In this paper, we study a bandit problem where the payoffs of arms are smooth on a graph. This framework is suitable for solving online learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-21 Michal Valko , Rémi Munos , Branislav Kveton , Tomáš Kocák

Stochastic linear bandits are a natural and simple generalisation of finite-armed bandits with numerous practical applications. Current approaches focus on generalising existing techniques for finite-armed bandits, notably the optimism…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-10-17 Tor Lattimore , Csaba Szepesvari

In many real-world scenarios, reward signal for agents are exceedingly sparse, making it challenging to learn an effective reward function for reward shaping. To address this issue, the proposed approach in this paper performs reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Wenyun Li , Wenjie Huang , Chen Sun

Contextual bandit algorithms are at the core of many applications, including recommender systems, clinical trials, and optimal portfolio selection. One of the most popular problems studied in the contextual bandit literature is to maximize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Siddhant Chaudhary , Abhishek Sinha

We study the problem of meta-learning several contextual stochastic bandits tasks by leveraging their concentration around a low-dimensional affine subspace, which we learn via online principal component analysis to reduce the expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Steven Bilaj , Sofien Dhouib , Setareh Maghsudi

Multi-task learning in contextual bandits has attracted significant research interest due to its potential to enhance decision-making across multiple related tasks by leveraging shared structures and task-specific heterogeneity. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Xia Jiang , Rong J. B. Zhu

We propose algorithms based on a multi-level Thompson sampling scheme, for the stochastic multi-armed bandit and its contextual variant with linear expected rewards, in the setting where arms are clustered. We show, both theoretically and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Emil Carlsson , Devdatt Dubhashi , Fredrik D. Johansson

Mobile health (mHealth) interventions often aim to improve distal outcomes, such as clinical conditions, by optimizing proximal outcomes through just-in-time adaptive interventions. Contextual bandits provide a suitable framework for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-31 Xueqing Liu , Nina Deliu , Tanujit Chakraborty , Lauren Bell , Bibhas Chakraborty

Finding an optimal matching in a weighted graph is a standard combinatorial problem. We consider its semi-bandit version where either a pair or a full matching is sampled sequentially. We prove that it is possible to leverage a rank-1…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-08-03 Flore Sentenac , Jialin Yi , Clément Calauzènes , Vianney Perchet , Milan Vojnovic

When comparing the performance of multi-armed bandit algorithms, the potential impact of missing data is often overlooked. In practice, it also affects their implementation where the simplest approach to overcome this is to continue to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-12 Xijin Chen , Kim May Lee , Sofia S. Villar , David S. Robertson

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

Thompson Sampling (TS) is one of the most effective algorithms for solving contextual multi-armed bandit problems. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, called Neural Thompson Sampling, which adapts deep neural networks for both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Weitong Zhang , Dongruo Zhou , Lihong Li , Quanquan Gu

Entropy maximization and free energy minimization are general physical principles for modeling the dynamics of various physical systems. Notable examples include modeling decision-making within the brain using the free-energy principle,…

We introduce Conformal Bandits, a novel framework integrating Conformal Prediction (CP) into bandit problems, a classic paradigm for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. Traditional regret-minimisation bandit strategies like…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Simone Cuonzo , Nina Deliu

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

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

Over the past few years, the multi-armed bandit model has become increasingly popular in the machine learning community, partly because of applications including online content optimization. This paper reviews two different sequential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Emilie Kaufmann , Aurélien Garivier

We consider a general multi-armed bandit problem with correlated (and simple contextual and restless) elements, as a relaxed control problem. By introducing an entropy regularisation, we obtain a smooth asymptotic approximation to the value…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-07 Samuel N. Cohen , Tanut Treetanthiploet

Zero-shot inference is a powerful paradigm that enables the use of large pretrained models for downstream classification tasks without further training. However, these models are vulnerable to inherited biases that can impact their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Dyah Adila , Changho Shin , Linrong Cai , Frederic Sala