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Stochastic bandit algorithms are usually analyzed under a mean-reward criterion, yet many problems favor arms with strong upper-tail performance, which we study herein. For a fixed miscoverage level \(\alpha\), the natural upper-tail target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Chengyu Du , Mengfan Xu

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

Combinatorial online learning is a fundamental task for selecting the optimal action (or super arm) as a combination of base arms in sequential interactions with systems providing stochastic rewards. It is applicable to diverse domains such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Seockbean Song , Youngsik Yoon , Siwei Wang , Wei Chen , Jungseul Ok

We study a stochastic budget-allocation problem over $K$ tasks. At each round $t$, the learner chooses an allocation $X_t \in \Delta_K$. Task $k$ succeeds with probability $F_k(X_{t,k})$, where $F_1,\dots,F_K$ are nondecreasing…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-05 François Bachoc , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Tommaso Cesari , Roberto Colomboni

We consider the problem where $N$ agents collaboratively interact with an instance of a stochastic $K$ arm bandit problem for $K \gg N$. The agents aim to simultaneously minimize the cumulative regret over all the agents for a total of $T$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-18 Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal , Kamyar Azizzadenesheli

We propose combinatorial cascading bandits, a class of partial monitoring problems where at each step a learning agent chooses a tuple of ground items subject to constraints and receives a reward if and only if the weights of all chosen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-11-18 Branislav Kveton , Zheng Wen , Azin Ashkan , Csaba Szepesvari

In a fixed-confidence pure exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits, an algorithm iteratively samples arms and should stop as early as possible and return the correct answer to a query about the arms distributions. We are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Adrienne Tuynman , Rémy Degenne

We provide two distributed confidence ball algorithms for solving linear bandit problems in peer to peer networks with limited communication capabilities. For the first, we assume that all the peers are solving the same linear bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-08 Nathan Korda , Balazs Szorenyi , Shuai Li

We explore a novel setting of the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem inspired from real world applications which we call bandits with "stochastic delayed composite anonymous feedback (SDCAF)". In SDCAF, the rewards on pulling arms are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-14 Siddhant Garg , Aditya Kumar Akash

Active learning aims to reduce annotation cost by predicting which samples are useful for a human teacher to label. However it has become clear there is no best active learning algorithm. Inspired by various philosophies about what…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-19 Kunkun Pang , Mingzhi Dong , Yang Wu , Timothy M. Hospedales

This paper investigates stochastic and adversarial combinatorial multi-armed bandit problems. In the stochastic setting under semi-bandit feedback, we derive a problem-specific regret lower bound, and discuss its scaling with the dimension…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-11-09 Richard Combes , M. Sadegh Talebi , Alexandre Proutiere , Marc Lelarge

We examine a multi-armed bandit problem with contextual information, where the objective is to ensure that each arm receives a minimum aggregated reward across contexts while simultaneously maximizing the total cumulative reward. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Ahmed Ben Yahmed , Hafedh El Ferchichi , Marc Abeille , Vianney Perchet

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

Bandit algorithms have various application in safety-critical systems, where it is important to respect the system constraints that rely on the bandit's unknown parameters at every round. In this paper, we formulate a linear stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-19 Sanae Amani , Mahnoosh Alizadeh , Christos Thrampoulidis

Despite the significant interests and many progresses in decentralized multi-player multi-armed bandits (MP-MAB) problems in recent years, the regret gap to the natural centralized lower bound in the heterogeneous MP-MAB setting remains…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-02 Chengshuai Shi , Wei Xiong , Cong Shen , Jing Yang

The Asymptotic Randomised Control (ARC) algorithm provides a rigorous approximation to the optimal strategy for a wide class of Bayesian bandits, while retaining low computational complexity. In particular, the ARC approach provides nearly…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-13 Samuel Cohen , Tanut Treetanthiploet

In this paper, we study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with graph feedback. Motivated by applications in clinical trials and recommendation systems, we assume that two arms are connected if and only if they are similar (i.e.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Han Qi , Fei Guo , Li Zhu , Qiaosheng Zhang

This paper studies the problem of adaptively sampling from K distributions (arms) in order to identify the largest gap between any two adjacent means. We call this the MaxGap-bandit problem. This problem arises naturally in approximate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-04 Sumeet Katariya , Ardhendu Tripathy , Robert Nowak

Modern optimization problems in scientific and engineering domains often rely on expensive black-box evaluations, such as those arising in physical simulations or deep learning pipelines, where gradient information is unavailable or…

Computation · Statistics 2026-01-05 Foo Hui-Mean , Yuan-chin Ivan Chang

We study the problem of learning 'good' interventions in a stochastic environment modeled by its underlying causal graph. Good interventions refer to interventions that maximize rewards. Specifically, we consider the setting of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Fateme Jamshidi , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash