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Self-play, where the algorithm learns by playing against itself without requiring any direct supervision, has become the new weapon in modern Reinforcement Learning (RL) for achieving superhuman performance in practice. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-10 Yu Bai , Chi Jin

Incentivized exploration in multi-armed bandits (MAB) has witnessed increasing interests and many progresses in recent years, where a principal offers bonuses to agents to do explorations on her behalf. However, almost all existing studies…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-28 Chengshuai Shi , Haifeng Xu , Wei Xiong , Cong Shen

In high-stakes AI applications, even a single action can cause irreparable damage. However, nearly all of sequential decision-making theory assumes that all errors are recoverable (e.g., by bounding rewards). Standard bandit algorithms that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Sarah Liaw , Benjamin Plaut

We study a strategic version of the multi-armed bandit problem, where each arm is an individual strategic agent and we, the principal, pull one arm each round. When pulled, the arm receives some private reward $v_a$ and can choose an amount…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-07-03 Mark Braverman , Jieming Mao , Jon Schneider , S. Matthew Weinberg

We study the problem of designing replication-proof bandit mechanisms when agents strategically register or replicate their own arms to maximize their payoff. Specifically, we consider Bayesian agents who only know the distribution from…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Suho Shin , Seyed A. Esmaeili , MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi

We consider a ubiquitous scenario in the Internet economy when individual decision-makers (henceforth, agents) both produce and consume information as they make strategic choices in an uncertain environment. This creates a three-way…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-04-09 Yishay Mansour , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Zhiwei Steven Wu

We study the problem of incentive-compatible online learning with bandit feedback. In this class of problems, the experts are self-interested agents who might misrepresent their preferences with the goal of being selected most often. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-13 Julian Zimmert , Teodor V. Marinov

We introduce the "inverse bandit" problem of estimating the rewards of a multi-armed bandit instance from observing the learning process of a low-regret demonstrator. Existing approaches to the related problem of inverse reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-23 Wenshuo Guo , Kumar Krishna Agrawal , Aditya Grover , Vidya Muthukumar , Ashwin Pananjady

We study how representation learning can improve the efficiency of bandit problems. We study the setting where we play $T$ linear bandits with dimension $d$ concurrently, and these $T$ bandit tasks share a common $k (\ll d)$ dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-06 Jiaqi Yang , Wei Hu , Jason D. Lee , Simon S. Du

While Large Language Models (LLMs) hold promise to become autonomous agents, they often explore suboptimally in sequential decision-making. Recent work has sought to enhance this capability via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Sanxing Chen , Xiaoyin Chen , Yukun Huang , Roy Xie , Bhuwan Dhingra

Stochastic linear bandits are a fundamental model for sequential decision making, where an agent selects a vector-valued action and receives a noisy reward with expected value given by an unknown linear function. Although well studied in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Bruce Huang , Ruida Zhou , Lin F. Yang , Suhas Diggavi

In this work, we introduce and study contextual search in general principal-agent games, where a principal repeatedly interacts with agents by offering contracts based on contextual information and historical feedback, without knowing the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Yiding Feng , Mengfan Ma , Bo Peng , Zongqi Wan

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 principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme -- called contract -- in order to induce an agent to take a costly, unobservable action leading to favorable outcomes. We consider a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Francesco Bacchiocchi , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

We consider the problem of learning to play a repeated multi-agent game with an unknown reward function. Single player online learning algorithms attain strong regret bounds when provided with full information feedback, which unfortunately…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Pier Giuseppe Sessa , Ilija Bogunovic , Maryam Kamgarpour , Andreas Krause

We study two-sided matching markets in which one side of the market (the players) does not have a priori knowledge about its preferences for the other side (the arms) and is required to learn its preferences from experience. Also, we assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Lydia T. Liu , Feng Ruan , Horia Mania , Michael I. Jordan

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

The Competing Bandits framework is a recently emerging area that integrates multi-armed bandits in online learning with stable matching in game theory. While conventional models assume that all players and arms are constantly available, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Shinnosuke Uba , Yutaro Yamaguchi

Motivated by applications such as online labor markets we consider a variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where we have a collection of arms representing strategic agents with different performance characteristics. The…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Seyed A. Esmaeili , Suho Shin , Aleksandrs Slivkins

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