English
Related papers

Related papers: How Does Variance Shape the Regret in Contextual B…

200 papers

We consider an adversarial variant of the classic $K$-armed linear contextual bandit problem where the sequence of loss functions associated with each arm are allowed to change without restriction over time. Under the assumption that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Gergely Neu , Julia Olkhovskaya

In this paper, we investigate the impact of context diversity on stochastic linear contextual bandits. As opposed to the previous view that contexts lead to more difficult bandit learning, we show that when the contexts are sufficiently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Weiqiang Wu , Jing Yang , Cong Shen

This paper studies the adversarial graphical contextual bandits, a variant of adversarial multi-armed bandits that leverage two categories of the most common side information: \emph{contexts} and \emph{side observations}. In this setting, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-18 Lingda Wang , Bingcong Li , Huozhi Zhou , Georgios B. Giannakis , Lav R. Varshney , Zhizhen Zhao

We consider the problem of contextual bandits where actions are subsets of a ground set and mean rewards are modeled by an unknown monotone submodular function that belongs to a class $\mathcal{F}$. We allow time-varying matroid constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Dean P. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin

In the bandits with knapsacks framework (BwK) the learner has $m$ resource-consumption (packing) constraints. We focus on the generalization of BwK in which the learner has a set of general long-term constraints. The goal of the learner is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-13 Martino Bernasconi , Matteo Castiglioni , Andrea Celli

We study nonparametric contextual bandits where Lipschitz mean reward functions may change over time. We first establish the minimax dynamic regret rate in this less understood setting in terms of number of changes $L$ and total-variation…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-21 Joe Suk , Samory Kpotufe

We study budget-constrained contextual bandits with adversarial contexts, where each action yields a random reward and incurs a random cost. We adopt the standard realizability assumption: conditioned on the observed context, rewards and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Dhruv Sarkar , Abhishek Sinha

We study the contextual multi-armed bandit problem with a finite context space (a.k.a. subpopulations), where the learner recommends a best action for each context and is evaluated by context-weighted simple regret. Our guarantees are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Mohammad Shahverdikondori , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash

We provide new insights on eluder dimension, a complexity measure that has been extensively used to bound the regret of algorithms for online bandits and reinforcement learning with function approximation. First, we study the relationship…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Gene Li , Pritish Kamath , Dylan J. Foster , Nathan Srebro

We study the adversarial multi-armed bandit problem in a setting where the player incurs a unit cost each time he switches actions. We prove that the player's $T$-round minimax regret in this setting is $\widetilde{\Theta}(T^{2/3})$,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-11-21 Ofer Dekel , Jian Ding , Tomer Koren , Yuval Peres

Contextual bandit learning is a reinforcement learning problem where the learner repeatedly receives a set of features (context), takes an action and receives a reward based on the action and context. We consider this problem under a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-05 Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudík , Satyen Kale , John Langford , Robert E. Schapire

This paper investigates stochastic multi-armed bandit algorithms that are robust to adversarial attacks, where an attacker can first observe the learner's action and {then} alter their reward observation. We study two cases of this model,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Xuchuang Wang , Jinhang Zuo , Xutong Liu , John C. S. Lui , Mohammad Hajiesmaili

Thanks to the power of representation learning, neural contextual bandit algorithms demonstrate remarkable performance improvement against their classical counterparts. But because their exploration has to be performed in the entire neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Yiling Jia , Weitong Zhang , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu , Hongning Wang

We study nonparametric contextual bandits under batch constraints, where the expected reward for each action is modeled as a smooth function of covariates, and the policy updates are made at the end of each batch of observations. We…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-06 Rong Jiang , Cong Ma

In this paper we study the adversarial combinatorial bandit with a known non-linear reward function, extending existing work on adversarial linear combinatorial bandit. {The adversarial combinatorial bandit with general non-linear reward is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-06 Xi Chen , Yanjun Han , Yining Wang

The contextual combinatorial semi-bandit problem with linear payoff functions is a decision-making problem in which a learner chooses a set of arms with the feature vectors in each round under given constraints so as to maximize the sum of…

Fast changing states or volatile environments pose a significant challenge to online optimization, which needs to perform rapid adaptation under limited observation. In this paper, we give query and regret optimal bandit algorithms under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Zhou Lu , Qiuyi Zhang , Xinyi Chen , Fred Zhang , David Woodruff , Elad Hazan

In this work we consider the problem of regret minimization for logistic bandits. The main challenge of logistic bandits is reducing the dependence on a potentially large problem dependent constant $\kappa$ that can at worst scale…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-08 Blake Mason , Kwang-Sung Jun , Lalit Jain

We study a sequential decision problem where the learner faces a sequence of $K$-armed bandit tasks. The task boundaries might be known (the bandit meta-learning setting), or unknown (the non-stationary bandit setting). For a given integer…

In this paper we consider the contextual multi-armed bandit problem for linear payoffs under a risk-averse criterion. At each round, contexts are revealed for each arm, and the decision maker chooses one arm to pull and receives the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Yifan Lin , Yuhao Wang , Enlu Zhou