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We introduce a novel extension of the canonical multi-armed bandit problem that incorporates an additional strategic innovation: abstention. In this enhanced framework, the agent is not only tasked with selecting an arm at each time step,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Junwen Yang , Tianyuan Jin , Vincent Y. F. Tan

In this paper, we investigate the streaming bandits problem, wherein the learner aims to minimize regret by dealing with online arriving arms and sublinear arm memory. We establish the tight worst-case regret lower bound of $\Omega \left(…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Shaoang Li , Lan Zhang , Junhao Wang , Xiang-Yang Li

We consider the Scale-Free Adversarial Multi Armed Bandits(MAB) problem. At the beginning of the game, the player only knows the number of arms $n$. It does not know the scale and magnitude of the losses chosen by the adversary or the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-12 Sudeep Raja Putta , Shipra Agrawal

The stochastic multi-armed bandit problem is a well-known model for studying the exploration-exploitation trade-off. It has significant possible applications in adaptive clinical trials, which allow for dynamic changes in the treatment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Hossein Aboutalebi , Doina Precup , Tibor Schuster

We study the $K$-armed contextual dueling bandit problem, a sequential decision making setting in which the learner uses contextual information to make two decisions, but only observes \emph{preference-based feedback} suggesting that one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-25 Aadirupa Saha , Akshay Krishnamurthy

We consider a stochastic bandit problem with a possibly infinite number of arms. We write $p^*$ for the proportion of optimal arms and $\Delta$ for the minimal mean-gap between optimal and sub-optimal arms. We characterize the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-08 Rianne de Heide , James Cheshire , Pierre Ménard , Alexandra Carpentier

We consider online no-regret learning in unknown games with bandit feedback, where each player can only observe its reward at each time -- determined by all players' current joint action -- rather than its gradient. We focus on the class of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-01 Wenjia Ba , Tianyi Lin , Jiawei Zhang , Zhengyuan Zhou

Designing efficient general-purpose contextual bandit algorithms that work with large -- or even continuous -- action spaces would facilitate application to important scenarios such as information retrieval, recommendation systems, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Yinglun Zhu , Paul Mineiro

A main problem of "Follow the Perturbed Leader" strategies for online decision problems is that regret bounds are typically proven against oblivious adversary. In partial observation cases, it was not clear how to obtain performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Jan Poland

Existing data-dependent and best-of-both-worlds regret bounds for multi-armed bandits problems have limited adaptivity as they are either data-dependent but not best-of-both-worlds (BOBW), BOBW but not data-dependent or have sub-optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Quan Nguyen , Shinji Ito , Junpei Komiyama , Nishant A. Mehta

In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, instance-dependent algorithms attain improved performance on "easy" problems with a gap between the best and second-best arm. Are similar guarantees possible for contextual bandits? While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin , David Simchi-Levi , Yunzong Xu

We study regret minimization in a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting and establish a fundamental trade-off between the regret suffered under an algorithm, and its statistical robustness. Considering broad classes of underlying arms'…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Kumar Ashutosh , Jayakrishnan Nair , Anmol Kagrecha , Krishna Jagannathan

We consider the problem of combining and learning over a set of adversarial bandit algorithms with the goal of adaptively tracking the best one on the fly. The CORRAL algorithm of Agarwal et al. (2017) and its variants (Foster et al.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Haipeng Luo , Mengxiao Zhang , Peng Zhao , Zhi-Hua Zhou

This paper considers a stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem with dual objectives: (i) quick identification and commitment to the optimal arm, and (ii) reward maximization throughout a sequence of $T$ consecutive rounds. Though each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Qining Zhang , Lei Ying

We study online learning with bandit feedback (i.e. learner has access to only zeroth-order oracle) where cost/reward functions $\f_t$ admit a "pseudo-1d" structure, i.e. $\f_t(\w) = \loss_t(\pred_t(\w))$ where the output of $\pred_t$ is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Aadirupa Saha , Nagarajan Natarajan , Praneeth Netrapalli , Prateek Jain

We consider the problem of contextual bandits and imitation learning, where the learner lacks direct knowledge of the executed action's reward. Instead, the learner can actively query an expert at each round to compare two actions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan , Wen Sun , Runzhe Wu

Combinatorial multi-armed bandits provide a fundamental online decision-making environment where a decision-maker interacts with an environment across $T$ time steps, each time selecting an action and learning the cost of that action. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Gerdus Benadè , Rathish Das , Thomas Lavastida

We study the linear contextual bandit problem with finite action sets. When the problem dimension is $d$, the time horizon is $T$, and there are $n \leq 2^{d/2}$ candidate actions per time period, we (1) show that the minimax expected…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-20 Yingkai Li , Yining Wang , Yuan Zhou

Most contextual bandit algorithms minimize regret against the best fixed policy, a questionable benchmark for non-stationary environments that are ubiquitous in applications. In this work, we develop several efficient contextual bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-05 Haipeng Luo , Chen-Yu Wei , Alekh Agarwal , John Langford

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