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Mode estimation is a classical problem in statistics with a wide range of applications in machine learning. Despite this, there is little understanding in its robustness properties under possibly adversarial data contamination. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-09 Aldo Pacchiano , Heinrich Jiang , Michael I. Jordan

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

In machine learning, the notion of multi-armed bandits refers to a class of online learning problems, in which an agent is supposed to simultaneously explore and exploit a given set of choice alternatives in the course of a sequential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Viktor Bengs , Robert Busa-Fekete , Adil El Mesaoudi-Paul , Eyke Hüllermeier

We study the fixed-confidence best-arm identification problem in unimodal bandits, in which the means of the arms increase with the index of the arm up to their maximum, then decrease. We derive two lower bounds on the stopping time of any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Riccardo Poiani , Marc Jourdan , Emilie Kaufmann , Rémy Degenne

Berry et al. (1997) initiated the development of the infinite arms bandit problem. They derived a regret lower bound of all allocation strategies for Bernoulli rewards with uniform priors, and proposed strategies based on success runs.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-23 Hock Peng Chan , Shouri Hu

Contextual bandits constitute a classical framework for decision-making under uncertainty. In this setting, the goal is to learn the arms of highest reward subject to contextual information, while the unknown reward parameters of each arm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-19 Hongju Park , Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh

We consider the bandit problem of selecting $K$ out of $N$ arms at each time step. The reward can be a non-linear function of the rewards of the selected individual arms. The direct use of a multi-armed bandit algorithm requires choosing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal , Christopher J. Quinn , Abhishek Umrawal

Identifying the best arm of a multi-armed bandit is a central problem in bandit optimization. We study a quantum computational version of this problem with coherent oracle access to states encoding the reward probabilities of each arm as…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-02-02 Daochen Wang , Xuchen You , Tongyang Li , Andrew M. Childs

In a linear stochastic bandit model, each arm is a vector in an Euclidean space and the observed return at each time step is an unknown linear function of the chosen arm at that time step. In this paper, we investigate the problem of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-25 Qiyu Kang , Wee Peng Tay

In the classic multi-armed bandits problem, the goal is to have a policy for dynamically operating arms that each yield stochastic rewards with unknown means. The key metric of interest is regret, defined as the gap between the expected…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2010-11-23 Yi Gai , Bhaskar Krishnamachari , Rahul Jain

Sampling from distributions to find the one with the largest mean arises in a broad range of applications, and it can be mathematically modeled as a multi-armed bandit problem in which each distribution is associated with an arm. This paper…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-06-18 Kevin Jamieson , Matthew Malloy , Robert Nowak , Sebastien Bubeck

Learning preferences implicit in the choices humans make is a well studied problem in both economics and computer science. However, most work makes the assumption that humans are acting (noisily) optimally with respect to their preferences.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-28 Lawrence Chan , Dylan Hadfield-Menell , Siddhartha Srinivasa , Anca Dragan

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

Interactive preference learning systems infer human preferences by presenting queries as pairs of options and collecting binary choices. Although binary choices are simple and widely used, they provide limited information about preference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Shen Li , Yuyang Zhang , Zhaolin Ren , Claire Liang , Na Li , Julie A. Shah

Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-07 Branislav Kveton , Martin Mladenov , Chih-Wei Hsu , Manzil Zaheer , Csaba Szepesvari , Craig Boutilier

We introduce a variant of the classical PAC multi-armed bandit problem. There is an ordered set of $n$ arms $A[1],\dots,A[n]$, each with some stochastic reward drawn from some unknown bounded distribution. The goal is to identify the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-11 Albert Cheu , Ravi Sundaram , Jonathan Ullman

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for neural combinatorial optimization, enabling models to learn heuristics that solve complex problems without requiring expert knowledge. Despite significant progress, existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Mingjun Pan , Guanquan Lin , You-Wei Luo , Bin Zhu , Zhien Dai , Lijun Sun , Chun Yuan

The multi objective bandit setting has traditionally been regarded as more complex than the single objective case, as multiple objectives must be optimized simultaneously. In contrast to this prevailing view, we demonstrate that when…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-16 Heesang Ann , Min-hwan Oh

We propose an online algorithm for cumulative regret minimization in a stochastic multi-armed bandit. The algorithm adds $O(t)$ i.i.d. pseudo-rewards to its history in round $t$ and then pulls the arm with the highest average reward in its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-06 Branislav Kveton , Csaba Szepesvari , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Craig Boutilier

We study the repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal indirectly interacts with the unknown environment by proposing incentives for the agent to play arms. Most existing work assumes the agent has full knowledge of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Junyan Liu , Lillian J. Ratliff