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We propose Streaming Bandits, a Restless Multi Armed Bandit (RMAB) framework in which heterogeneous arms may arrive and leave the system after staying on for a finite lifetime. Streaming Bandits naturally capture the health intervention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-17 Aditya Mate , Arpita Biswas , Christoph Siebenbrunner , Susobhan Ghosh , Milind Tambe

We consider finite state restless multi-armed bandit problem. The decision maker can act on M bandits out of N bandits in each time step. The play of arm (active arm) yields state dependent rewards based on action and when the arm is not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-02 Vishesh Mittal , Rahul Meshram , Deepak Dev , Surya Prakash

The Whittle index, which characterizes optimal policies for controlling certain single restless bandit projects (a Markov decision process with two actions: active and passive) is the basis for a widely used heuristic index policy for the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-05-05 José Niño-Mora

Restless multi-armed bandits (RMABs) extend multi-armed bandits to allow for stateful arms, where the state of each arm evolves restlessly with different transitions depending on whether that arm is pulled. Solving RMABs requires…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Kai Wang , Lily Xu , Aparna Taneja , Milind Tambe

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

We propose and study Collpasing Bandits, a new restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) setting in which each arm follows a binary-state Markovian process with a special structure: when an arm is played, the state is fully observed, thus…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-10 Aditya Mate , Jackson A. Killian , Haifeng Xu , Andrew Perrault , Milind Tambe

Restless multi-armed bandits (RMABs) are a popular framework for algorithmic decision making in sequential settings with limited resources. RMABs are increasingly being used for sensitive decisions such as in public health, treatment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Jackson A. Killian , Manish Jain , Yugang Jia , Jonathan Amar , Erich Huang , Milind Tambe

Restless multi-armed bandits (RMABs) have been widely utilized to address resource allocation problems with Markov reward processes (MRPs). Existing works often assume that the dynamics of MRPs are known prior, which makes the RMAB problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Jingwen Tong , Xinran Li , Liqun Fu , Jun Zhang , Khaled B. Letaief

In restless bandits, a central agent is tasked with optimally distributing limited resources across several bandits (arms), with each arm being a Markov decision process. In this work, we generalize the traditional restless bandits problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Nima Akbarzadeh , Yossiri Adulyasak , Erick Delage

Restless multi-armed bandits (RMABs) provide a scalable framework for sequential decision-making under uncertainty, but classical formulations assume binary actions and a single global budget. Real-world settings, such as healthcare, often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Himadri S. Pandey , Kai Wang , Gian-Gabriel P. Garcia

We consider a class of restless bandit problems that finds a broad application area in reinforcement learning and stochastic optimization. We consider $N$ independent discrete-time Markov processes, each of which had two possible states: 1…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-14 Keqin Liu , Richard Weber , Chengzhong Zhang

Restless multi-armed bandits (RMAB) have been widely used to model sequential decision making problems with constraints. The decision maker (DM) aims to maximize the expected total reward over an infinite horizon under an "instantaneous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-25 Shufan Wang , Guojun Xiong , Jian Li

We consider restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) with a finite horizon and multiple pulls per period. Leveraging the Lagrangian relaxation, we approximate the problem with a collection of single arm problems. We then propose an index-based…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-07-04 Weici Hu , Peter Frazier

We propose a reinforcement learning based scheduling framework for Restless Multi-Armed Bandit (RMAB) problems, centred on a Whittle Index Q-Learning policy with Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) exploration, referred to as WIQL-UCB. Unlike…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-14 Sokipriala Jonah , Seong Ki Yoo , Saurav Sthapit

The restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) framework is a popular model with applications across a wide variety of fields. However, its solution is hindered by the exponentially growing state space (with respect to the number of arms) and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Gongpu Chen , Soung Chang Liew , Deniz Gunduz

Multi-action restless multi-armed bandits (RMABs) are a powerful framework for constrained resource allocation in which $N$ independent processes are managed. However, previous work only study the offline setting where problem dynamics are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-24 Jackson A. Killian , Arpita Biswas , Sanket Shah , Milind Tambe

We study the Improving Multi-Armed Bandit (IMAB) problem, where the reward obtained from an arm increases with the number of pulls it receives. This model provides an elegant abstraction for many real-world problems in domains such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-22 Vishakha Patil , Vineet Nair , Ganesh Ghalme , Arindam Khan

The multi-armed restless bandit framework allows to model a wide variety of decision-making problems in areas as diverse as industrial engineering, computer communication, operations research, financial engineering, communication networks…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-27 Urtzi Ayesta , Manu K. Gupta , Ina Maria Verloop

The Reward-Biased Maximum Likelihood Estimate (RBMLE) for adaptive control of Markov chains was proposed to overcome the central obstacle of what is variously called the fundamental "closed-identifiability problem" of adaptive control, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Akshay Mete , Rahul Singh , Xi Liu , P. R. Kumar

Multi-armed bandits (MAB) are commonly used in sequential online decision-making when the reward of each decision is an unknown random variable. In practice however, the typical goal of maximizing total reward may be less important than…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Ishank Juneja , Carlee Joe-Wong , Osman Yağan