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We study finite-armed semiparametric bandits, where each arm's reward combines a linear component with an unknown, potentially adversarial shift. This model strictly generalizes classical linear bandits and reflects complexities common in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-18 Seok-Jin Kim , Gi-Soo Kim , Min-hwan Oh

Given a set of arms $\mathcal{Z}\subset \mathbb{R}^d$ and an unknown parameter vector $\theta_\ast\in\mathbb{R}^d$, the pure exploration linear bandit problem aims to return $\arg\max_{z\in \mathcal{Z}} z^{\top}\theta_{\ast}$, with high…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-26 Zhaoqi Li , Kevin Jamieson , Lalit Jain

We address multi-armed bandits (MAB) where the objective is to maximize the cumulative reward under a probabilistic linear constraint. For a few real-world instances of this problem, constrained extensions of the well-known Thompson…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-14 Vidit Saxena , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Joakim Jaldén

There are many important practical optimization problems whose feasible regions are not known to be nonempty or not, and optimizers of the objective function with the least constraint violation prefer to be found. A natural way for dealing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-12 Yu-Hong Dai , Liwei Zhang

Best arm identification (or, pure exploration) in multi-armed bandits is a fundamental problem in machine learning. In this paper we study the distributed version of this problem where we have multiple agents, and they want to learn the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-02 Chao Tao , Qin Zhang , Yuan Zhou

Satisficing is a relaxation of maximizing and allows for less risky decision making in the face of uncertainty. We propose two sets of satisficing objectives for the multi-armed bandit problem, where the objective is to achieve reward-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-12-20 Paul Reverdy , Vaibhav Srivastava , Naomi Ehrich Leonard

Reinforcement learning studies how to balance exploration and exploitation in real-world systems, optimizing interactions with the world while simultaneously learning how the world operates. One general class of algorithms for such learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-10 Iñigo Urteaga , Chris H. Wiggins

The celebrated multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory models the basic trade-off between exploration, or learning about the state of a system, and exploitation, or utilizing the system. In this paper we study the variant of the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2013-06-19 Sudipto Guha , Kamesh Munagala

We address a generalization of the bandit with knapsacks problem, where a learner aims to maximize rewards while satisfying an arbitrary set of long-term constraints. Our goal is to design best-of-both-worlds algorithms that perform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Martino Bernasconi , Matteo Castiglioni , Andrea Celli , Federico Fusco

We study the problem of dynamic batch learning in high-dimensional sparse linear contextual bandits, where a decision maker, under a given maximum-number-of-batch constraint and only able to observe rewards at the end of each batch, can…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-19 Zhimei Ren , Zhengyuan Zhou

We study stochastic linear optimization problem with bandit feedback. The set of arms take values in an $N$-dimensional space and belong to a bounded polyhedron described by finitely many linear inequalities. We provide a lower bound for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-09-29 Manjesh K. Hanawal , Amir Leshem , Venkatesh Saligrama

We study multi-task representation learning for the problem of pure exploration in bilinear bandits. In bilinear bandits, an action takes the form of a pair of arms from two different entity types and the reward is a bilinear function of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Qiaomin Xie , Josiah P. Hanna , Robert Nowak

Deep reinforcement learning has enabled human-level or even super-human performance in various types of games. However, the amount of exploration required for learning is often quite large. Deep reinforcement learning also has super-human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Akane Minami , Yu Kono , Tatsuji Takahashi

This paper addresses the problem of learning to sparsify stochastic linear bandits, where a decision-maker sequentially selects actions from a high-dimensional space subject to a sparsity constraint on the number of nonzero elements in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Zhengmiao Wang , Ming Chi , Zhi-Wei Liu , Lintao Ye , Carla Fabiana Chiasserini

Despite their success in many domains, large language models (LLMs) remain under-studied in scenarios requiring optimal decision-making under uncertainty. This is crucial as many real-world applications, ranging from personalized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Allen Nie , Yi Su , Bo Chang , Jonathan N. Lee , Ed H. Chi , Quoc V. Le , Minmin Chen

Exploration policies in Bayesian bandits maximize the average reward over problem instances drawn from some distribution $\mathcal{P}$. In this work, we learn such policies for an unknown distribution $\mathcal{P}$ using samples from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Craig Boutilier , Chih-Wei Hsu , Branislav Kveton , Martin Mladenov , Csaba Szepesvari , Manzil Zaheer

Bandit problems with linear or concave reward have been extensively studied, but relatively few works have studied bandits with non-concave reward. This work considers a large family of bandit problems where the unknown underlying reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-12 Baihe Huang , Kaixuan Huang , Sham M. Kakade , Jason D. Lee , Qi Lei , Runzhe Wang , Jiaqi Yang

Motivated by the need to efficiently identify multiple candidates in high trial-and-error cost tasks such as drug discovery, we propose a near-optimal algorithm to identify all {\epsilon}-best arms (i.e., those at most {\epsilon} worse than…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-02 Zhekai Li , Tianyi Ma , Cheng Hua , Ruihao Zhu

In this paper, we consider a best action identification problem in the stochastic linear bandit setup with a fixed confident constraint. In the considered best action identification problem, instead of minimizing the accumulative regret as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-04 Jun Geng , Lifeng Lai

Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) algorithms are widely used in recommender systems that require continuous, incremental learning. A core aspect of MABs is the exploration-exploitation trade-off: choosing between exploiting items likely to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Pedro R. Pires , Gregorio F. Azevedo , Pietro L. Campos , Rafael T. Sereicikas , Tiago A. Almeida