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In online learning problems, exploiting low variance plays an important role in obtaining tight performance guarantees yet is challenging because variances are often not known a priori. Recently, considerable progress has been made by Zhang…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-07 Yeoneung Kim , Insoon Yang , Kwang-Sung Jun

Online learning has traditionally focused on the expected rewards. In this paper, a risk-averse online learning problem under the performance measure of the mean-variance of the rewards is studied. Both the bandit and full information…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-15 Sattar Vakili , Alexis Boukouvalas , Qing Zhao

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

We consider minimisation of dynamic regret in non-stationary bandits with a slowly varying property. Namely, we assume that arms' rewards are stochastic and independent over time, but that the absolute difference between the expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Ramakrishnan Krishnamurthy , Aditya Gopalan

We study the fundamental limits of learning in contextual bandits, where a learner's rewards depend on their actions and a known context, which extends the canonical multi-armed bandit to the case where side-information is available. We are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-13 Moise Blanchard , Steve Hanneke , Patrick Jaillet

This paper addresses the critical challenge of stochastic latent heterogeneity in online decision-making, where individuals' responses to actions vary not only with observable contexts but also with unobserved, randomly realized subgroups.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Elynn Chen , Xi Chen , Wenbo Jing , Xiao Liu

We study a bandit version of phase retrieval where the learner chooses actions $(A_t)_{t=1}^n$ in the $d$-dimensional unit ball and the expected reward is $\langle A_t, \theta_\star\rangle^2$ where $\theta_\star \in \mathbb R^d$ is an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-07 Tor Lattimore , Botao Hao

We study a class of adversarial bandit optimization problems in which the loss functions may be non-convex and non-smooth. In each round, the learner observes a loss that consists of an underlying linear component together with an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Zhuoyu Cheng , Kohei Hatano , Eiji Takimoto

Contextual bandit with linear reward functions is among one of the most extensively studied models in bandit and online learning research. Recently, there has been increasing interest in designing \emph{locally private} linear contextual…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-16 Jiachun Li , David Simchi-Levi , Yining Wang

We introduce the problem of regret minimization in Adversarial Dueling Bandits. As in classic Dueling Bandits, the learner has to repeatedly choose a pair of items and observe only a relative binary `win-loss' feedback for this pair, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-29 Aadirupa Saha , Tomer Koren , Yishay Mansour

Motivated by practical needs such as large-scale learning, we study the impact of adaptivity constraints to linear contextual bandits, a central problem in online active learning. We consider two popular limited adaptivity models in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-26 Yufei Ruan , Jiaqi Yang , Yuan Zhou

Cascading bandits is a natural and popular model that frames the task of learning to rank from Bernoulli click feedback in a bandit setting. For the case of unstructured rewards, we prove matching upper and lower bounds for the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Daniel Vial , Sujay Sanghavi , Sanjay Shakkottai , R. Srikant

We study the distribution of regret in stochastic multi-armed bandits and episodic reinforcement learning through a unified framework. We formalize a distributional regret bound as a probabilistic guarantee that holds uniformly over all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Harin Lee , Min-hwan Oh

We present an efficient algorithm for linear contextual bandits with adversarial losses and stochastic action sets. Our approach reduces this setting to misspecification-robust adversarial linear bandits with fixed action sets. Without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Tim van Erven , Jack Mayo , Julia Olkhovskaya , Chen-Yu Wei

It is well-known that for sparse linear bandits, when ignoring the dependency on sparsity which is much smaller than the ambient dimension, the worst-case minimax regret is $\widetilde{\Theta}\left(\sqrt{dT}\right)$ where $d$ is the ambient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-08 Yan Dai , Ruosong Wang , Simon S. Du

Linear contextual bandit is an important class of sequential decision making problems with a wide range of applications to recommender systems, online advertising, healthcare, and many other machine learning related tasks. While there is a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-28 Yingkai Li , Yining Wang , Xi Chen , Yuan Zhou

We provide the first oracle efficient sublinear regret algorithms for adversarial versions of the contextual bandit problem. In this problem, the learner repeatedly makes an action on the basis of a context and receives reward for the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-02-09 Vasilis Syrgkanis , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Robert E. Schapire

Modern systems, such as digital platforms and service systems, increasingly rely on contextual bandits for online decision-making; however, their deployment can inadvertently create unfair exposure among arms, undermining long-term platform…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-05 Qingwen Zhang , Wenjia Wang

We propose a simple model selection approach for algorithms in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. As opposed to prior work that (implicitly) assumes knowledge of the optimal regret, we only require that each base…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Aldo Pacchiano , Christoph Dann , Claudio Gentile , Peter Bartlett

Regret bounds in online learning compare the player's performance to $L^*$, the optimal performance in hindsight with a fixed strategy. Typically such bounds scale with the square root of the time horizon $T$. The more refined concept of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-12 Zeyuan Allen-Zhu , Sébastien Bubeck , Yuanzhi Li