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Multi-armed bandit problems are considered as a paradigm of the trade-off between exploring the environment to find profitable actions and exploiting what is already known. In the stationary case, the distributions of the rewards do not…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2008-12-18 Aurélien Garivier , Eric Moulines

Causal discovery aims to uncover cause-and-effect relationships encoded in causal graphs by leveraging observational, interventional data, or their combination. The majority of existing causal discovery methods are developed assuming…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Muhammad Qasim Elahi , Lai Wei , Murat Kocaoglu , Mahsa Ghasemi

In combinatorial causal bandits (CCB), the learning agent chooses a subset of variables in each round to intervene and collects feedback from the observed variables to minimize expected regret or sample complexity. Previous works study this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Shi Feng , Nuoya Xiong , Wei Chen

In this paper, we formulate the multi-agent graph bandit problem as a multi-agent extension of the graph bandit problem introduced by Zhang, Johansson, and Li [CISS 57, 1-6 (2023)]. In our formulation, $N$ cooperative agents travel on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Phevos Paschalidis , Runyu Zhang , Na Li

Stochastic multi-armed bandits (MABs) provide a fundamental reinforcement learning model to study sequential decision making in uncertain environments. The upper confidence bounds (UCB) algorithm gave birth to the renaissance of bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Ambrus Tamás , Szabolcs Szentpéteri , Balázs Csanád Csáji

Causal discovery is a fundamental problem with applications spanning various areas in science and engineering. It is well understood that solely using observational data, one can only orient the causal graph up to its Markov equivalence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Zihan Zhou , Muhammad Qasim Elahi , Murat Kocaoglu

We study the problem of globally optimising a target variable of an unknown causal graph on which a sequence of soft or hard interventions can be performed. The problem of optimising the target variable associated with a causal graph is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Sumantrak Mukherjee , Mengyan Zhang , Seth Flaxman , Sebastian Josef Vollmer

We consider the correlated multiarmed bandit (MAB) problem in which the rewards associated with each arm are modeled by a multivariate Gaussian random variable, and we investigate the influence of the assumptions in the Bayesian prior on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-07-09 Vaibhav Srivastava , Paul Reverdy , Naomi Ehrich Leonard

We study the stochastic contextual bandit problem, where the reward is generated from an unknown function with additive noise. No assumption is made about the reward function other than boundedness. We propose a new algorithm, NeuralUCB,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-03 Dongruo Zhou , Lihong Li , Quanquan Gu

Contextual multi-armed bandits (CMAB) have been widely used for learning to filter and prioritize information according to a user's interest. In this work, we analyze top-K ranking under the CMAB framework where the top-K arms are chosen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-31 Michael Rawson , Jade Freeman

In this work, we investigate the problem of adapting to the presence or absence of causal structure in multi-armed bandit problems. In addition to the usual reward signal, we assume the learner has access to additional variables, observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Ziyi Liu , Idan Attias , Daniel M. Roy

Contextual bandits aim to identify among a set of arms the optimal one with the highest reward based on their contextual information. Motivated by the fact that the arms usually exhibit group behaviors and the mutual impacts exist among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-13 Yunzhe Qi , Yikun Ban , Jingrui He

Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) method is arguably the most celebrated one used in online decision making with partial information feedback. Existing techniques for constructing confidence bounds are typically built upon various concentration…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-01 Botao Hao , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Zheng Wen , Guang Cheng

Many applications require optimizing an unknown, noisy function that is expensive to evaluate. We formalize this task as a multi-armed bandit problem, where the payoff function is either sampled from a Gaussian process (GP) or has low RKHS…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-13 Niranjan Srinivas , Andreas Krause , Sham M. Kakade , Matthias Seeger

The contextual bandit framework is widely used to solve sequential optimization problems where the reward of each decision depends on auxiliary context variables. In settings such as medicine, business, and engineering, the decision maker…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-17 Kevin Li , Eric Laber

Although real-world decision-making problems can often be encoded as causal multi-armed bandits (CMABs) at different levels of abstraction, a general methodology exploiting the information and computational advantages of each abstraction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Joel Dyer , Nicholas Bishop , Anisoara Calinescu , Michael Wooldridge , Fabio Massimo Zennaro

In this paper, we study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with graph feedback. Motivated by the clinical trials and recommendation problem, we assume that two arms are connected if and only if they are similar (i.e., their means are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Han Qi , Guo Fei , Li Zhu

The multi-armed bandit(MAB) problem is a simple yet powerful framework that has been extensively studied in the context of decision-making under uncertainty. In many real-world applications, such as robotic applications, selecting an arm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Tianpeng Zhang , Kasper Johansson , Na Li

Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithms are a widely-used class of sequential algorithms for the $K$-armed bandit problem. Despite extensive research over the past decades aimed at understanding their asymptotic and (near) minimax…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-12-10 Qiyang Han , Koulik Khamaru , Cun-Hui Zhang

Causal knowledge can be used to support decision-making problems. This has been recognized in the causal bandits literature, where a causal (multi-armed) bandit is characterized by a causal graphical model and a target variable. The arms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Francisco N. F. Q. Simoes , Itai Feigenbaum , Mehdi Dastani , Thijs van Ommen