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We consider a bandit problem where the buget is smaller than the number of arms, which may be infinite. In this regime, the usual objective in the literature is to minimize simple regret. To analyze broad classes of distributions with…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-11-04 Emmanuel Pilliat

Restless Multi-Armed Bandits (RMABs) are a powerful framework for sequential decision-making, widely applied in resource allocation and intervention optimization challenges in public health. However, traditional RMABs assume independence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Hanmo Zhang , Zenghui Sun , Kai Wang

Multi-arm bandit (MAB) and stochastic linear bandit (SLB) are important models in reinforcement learning, and it is well-known that classical algorithms for bandits with time horizon $T$ suffer $\Omega(\sqrt{T})$ regret. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Zongqi Wan , Zhijie Zhang , Tongyang Li , Jialin Zhang , Xiaoming Sun

Safe exploration remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), limiting the deployment of RL agents in the real world. We propose Sampling-Based Safe Reinforcement Learning (SBSRL), a model-based RL algorithm that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Luca Vignola , Bruce D. Lee , Manish Prajapat , Manuel Wendl , Melanie Zeilinger , Andreas Krause , Yarden As

We study how the regret guarantees of nonstochastic multi-armed bandits can be improved, if the effective range of the losses in each round is small (e.g. the maximal difference between two losses in a given round). Despite a recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-03 Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Ohad Shamir

We study an interesting variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, called the Fair-SMAB problem, where each arm is required to be pulled for at least a given fraction of the total available rounds. We investigate the interplay…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-24 Vishakha Patil , Ganesh Ghalme , Vineet Nair , Y. Narahari

In this paper we present a model for the hidden Markovian bandit problem with linear rewards. As opposed to current work on Markovian bandits, we do not assume that the state is known to the decision maker before making the decision.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-25 Michal Yemini , Amir Leshem , Anelia Somekh-Baruch

Stochastic delays in feedback lead to unstable sequential learning using multi-armed bandits. Recently, empirical Bayesian shrinkage has been shown to improve reward estimation in bandit learning. Here, we propose a novel adaptation to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Srivas Chennu , Jamie Martin , Puli Liyanagama , Phil Mohr

State abstraction has been an essential tool for dramatically improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement-learning algorithms. Indeed, by exposing and accentuating various types of latent structure within the environment, different…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Dilip Arumugam , Benjamin Van Roy

The Rubiks Cube, with its vast state space and sparse reward structure, presents a significant challenge for reinforcement learning (RL) due to the difficulty of reaching rewarded states. Previous research addressed this by propagating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Yicheng Lin , Siyu Liang

In many environments only a tiny subset of all states yield high reward. In these cases, few of the interactions with the environment provide a relevant learning signal. Hence, we may want to preferentially train on those high-reward states…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved some impressive recent successes in various computer games and simulations. Most of these successes are based on having large numbers of episodes from which the agent can learn. In typical robotic…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-01-05 Jonas Tebbe , Lukas Krauch , Yapeng Gao , Andreas Zell

This paper proposes a variant of multiple-play stochastic bandits tailored to resource allocation problems arising from LLM applications, edge intelligence, etc. The model is composed of $M$ arms and $K$ plays. Each arm has a stochastic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Hong Xie , Haoran Gu , Yanying Huang , Tao Tan , Defu Lian

We study a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, where at each time step, the player observes an independently sampled context that determines the arms' mean rewards. However, playing an arm blocks it (across all contexts) for a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Soumya Basu , Orestis Papadigenopoulos , Constantine Caramanis , Sanjay Shakkottai

In this paper, we investigate a largely extended version of classical MAB problem, called networked combinatorial bandit problems. In particular, we consider the setting of a decision maker over a networked bandits as follows: each time a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-23 Shaojie Tang , Yaqin Zhou

Contextual multi-armed bandit has shown to be an effective tool in recommender systems. In this paper, we study a novel problem of multi-facet bandits involving a group of bandits, each characterizing the users' needs from one unique…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-02 Yikun Ban , Jingrui He , Curtiss B. Cook

By exploiting ultrafast and irregular time series generated by lasers with delayed feedback, we have previously demonstrated a scalable algorithm to solve multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems utilizing the time-division multiplexing of laser…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-05-28 Naoki Narisawa , Nicolas Chauvet , Mikio Hasegawa , Makoto Naruse

Motivated by modern applications, such as online advertisement and recommender systems, we study the top-$k$ extreme contextual bandits problem, where the total number of arms can be enormous, and the learner is allowed to select $k$ arms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-17 Rajat Sen , Alexander Rakhlin , Lexing Ying , Rahul Kidambi , Dean Foster , Daniel Hill , Inderjit Dhillon

A novel reinforcement learning algorithm is introduced for multiarmed restless bandits with average reward, using the paradigms of Q-learning and Whittle index. Specifically, we leverage the structure of the Whittle index policy to reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-22 Konstantin E. Avrachenkov , Vivek S. Borkar

We study the piecewise stationary combinatorial semi-bandit problem with causally related rewards. In our nonstationary environment, variations in the base arms' distributions, causal relationships between rewards, or both, change the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-27 Behzad Nourani-Koliji , Steven Bilaj , Amir Rezaei Balef , Setareh Maghsudi