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The Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit problem is a sequential decision-making problem in which an agent selects a set of arms on each round, observes feedback for each of these arms and aims to maximize a known reward function of the arms it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-17 Nadav Merlis , Shie Mannor

Whittle index policy is a powerful tool to obtain asymptotically optimal solutions for the notoriously intractable problem of restless bandits. However, finding the Whittle indices remains a difficult problem for many practical restless…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-21 Khaled Nakhleh , Santosh Ganji , Ping-Chun Hsieh , I-Hong Hou , Srinivas Shakkottai

Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Sourav Ganguly , Kishan Panaganti , Arnob Ghosh , Adam Wierman

We study a novel multi-armed bandit problem that models the challenge faced by a company wishing to explore new strategies to maximize revenue whilst simultaneously maintaining their revenue above a fixed baseline, uniformly over time.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-02-16 Yifan Wu , Roshan Shariff , Tor Lattimore , Csaba Szepesvári

We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with i.i.d. rewards where the expected reward function is multimodal with at most m modes. We propose the first known computationally tractable algorithm for computing the solution to the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-31 William Réveillard , Richard Combes

We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting and study the problem of constrained regret minimization over a given time horizon. Each arm is associated with an unknown, possibly multi-dimensional distribution, and the merit of an arm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Anmol Kagrecha , Jayakrishnan Nair , Krishna Jagannathan

We consider the infinitely many-armed bandit problem with rotting rewards, where the mean reward of an arm decreases at each pull of the arm according to an arbitrary trend with maximum rotting rate $\varrho=o(1)$. We show that this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Jung-hun Kim , Milan Vojnovic , Se-Young Yun

In this paper, we consider several finite-horizon Bayesian multi-armed bandit problems with side constraints which are computationally intractable (NP-Hard) and for which no optimal (or near optimal) algorithms are known to exist with…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2013-07-18 Sudipto Guha , Kamesh Munagala

Reinforcement learning is an attractive approach to learn good resource allocation and scheduling policies based on data when the system model is unknown. However, the cumulative regret of most RL algorithms scales as $\tilde O(\mathsf{S}…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-28 Nima Akbarzadeh , Aditya Mahajan

Multi-armed bandit problems (MABPs) are a special type of optimal control problem well suited to model resource allocation under uncertainty in a wide variety of contexts. Since the first publication of the optimal solution of the classic…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-07-30 Sofía S. Villar , Jack Bowden , James Wason

The improving multi-armed bandits problem is a formal model for allocating effort under uncertainty, motivated by scenarios such as investing research effort into new technologies, performing clinical trials, and hyperparameter selection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Avrim Blum , Marten Garicano , Kavya Ravichandran , Dravyansh Sharma

We study MNL bandits, which is a variant of the traditional multi-armed bandit problem, under risk criteria. Unlike the ordinary expected revenue, risk criteria are more general goals widely used in industries and bussiness. We design…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-17 Guangyu Xi , Chao Tao , Yuan Zhou

Consider a requester who wishes to crowdsource a series of identical binary labeling tasks to a pool of workers so as to achieve an assured accuracy for each task, in a cost optimal way. The workers are heterogeneous with unknown but fixed…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-06-18 Shweta Jain , Sujit Gujar , Satyanath Bhat , Onno Zoeter , Y. Narahari

Multi-player multi-armed bandits (MMAB) study how decentralized players cooperatively play the same multi-armed bandit so as to maximize their total cumulative rewards. Existing MMAB models mostly assume when more than one player pulls the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-29 Xuchuang Wang , Hong Xie , John C. S. Lui

Recommendation systems when employed in markets play a dual role: they assist users in selecting their most desired items from a large pool and they help in allocating a limited number of items to the users who desire them the most. Despite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Yigit Efe Erginbas , Soham Phade , Kannan Ramchandran

We develop asymptotically optimal policies for the multi armed bandit (MAB), problem, under a cost constraint. This model is applicable in situations where each sample (or activation) from a population (bandit) incurs a known bandit…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-12-18 Apostolos N. Burnetas , Odysseas Kanavetas , Michael N. Katehakis

Whittle index is a generalization of Gittins index that provides very efficient allocation rules for restless multi-armed bandits. In this work, we develop an algorithm to test the indexability and compute the Whittle indices of any…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2023-06-23 Nicolas Gast , Bruno Gaujal , Kimang Khun

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

We study a generalization of the multi-armed bandit problem with multiple plays where there is a cost associated with pulling each arm and the agent has a budget at each time that dictates how much she can expect to spend. We derive an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-13 Alexander Luedtke , Emilie Kaufmann , Antoine Chambaz

The multi-armed bandit (MAB) model is one of the most classical models to study decision-making in an uncertain environment. In this model, a player chooses one of $K$ possible arms of a bandit machine to play at each time step, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Bo Li , Chi Ho Yeung