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In the classical contextual bandits problem, in each round $t$, a learner observes some context $c$, chooses some action $i$ to perform, and receives some reward $r_{i,t}(c)$. We consider the variant of this problem where in addition to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-17 Santiago Balseiro , Negin Golrezaei , Mohammad Mahdian , Vahab Mirrokni , Jon Schneider

We study the contextual continuum bandits problem, where the learner sequentially receives a side information vector and has to choose an action in a convex set, minimizing a function associated with the context. The goal is to minimize all…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-28 Arya Akhavan , Karim Lounici , Massimiliano Pontil , Alexandre B. Tsybakov

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

Recent works have shown a reduction from contextual bandits to online regression under a realizability assumption [Foster and Rakhlin, 2020, Foster and Krishnamurthy, 2021]. In this work, we investigate the use of neural networks for such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Rohan Deb , Yikun Ban , Shiliang Zuo , Jingrui He , Arindam Banerjee

We introduce the problem of model selection for contextual bandits, where a learner must adapt to the complexity of the optimal policy while balancing exploration and exploitation. Our main result is a new model selection guarantee for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-15 Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Haipeng Luo

We study stochastic multi-armed bandits under simultaneous constraints on space and adaptivity: the learner interacts with the environment in $B$ batches and has only $W$ bits of persistent memory. Prior work shows that each constraint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Ruiyuan Huang , Zicheng Lyu , Xiaoyi Zhu , Zengfeng Huang

We study stochastic linear bandits with heavy-tailed rewards, where the rewards have a finite $(1+\epsilon)$-absolute central moment bounded by $\upsilon$ for some $\epsilon \in (0,1]$. We improve both upper and lower bounds on the minimax…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Artin Tajdini , Jonathan Scarlett , Kevin Jamieson

We give an oracle-based algorithm for the adversarial contextual bandit problem, where either contexts are drawn i.i.d. or the sequence of contexts is known a priori, but where the losses are picked adversarially. Our algorithm is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-02 Vasilis Syrgkanis , Haipeng Luo , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Robert E. Schapire

We investigate multiarmed bandits with delayed feedback, where the delays need neither be identical nor bounded. We first prove that "delayed" Exp3 achieves the $O(\sqrt{(KT + D)\ln K} )$ regret bound conjectured by Cesa-Bianchi et al.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-20 Tobias Sommer Thune , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Yevgeny Seldin

Typical contextual bandit algorithms assume that the rewards at each round lie in some fixed range $[0, R]$, and their regret scales polynomially with this reward range $R$. However, many practical scenarios naturally involve heavy-tailed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-05 Chenlu Ye , Yujia Jin , Alekh Agarwal , Tong Zhang

We use surrogate losses to obtain several new regret bounds and new algorithms for contextual bandit learning. Using the ramp loss, we derive new margin-based regret bounds in terms of standard sequential complexity measures of a benchmark…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-06 Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy

Designing efficient general-purpose contextual bandit algorithms that work with large -- or even continuous -- action spaces would facilitate application to important scenarios such as information retrieval, recommendation systems, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Yinglun Zhu , Paul Mineiro

This paper studies semiparametric contextual bandits, a generalization of the linear stochastic bandit problem where the reward for an action is modeled as a linear function of known action features confounded by an non-linear…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-17 Akshay Krishnamurthy , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Vasilis Syrgkanis

We study contextual bandits in the presence of a stage-wise constraint when the constraint must be satisfied both with high probability and in expectation. We start with the linear case where both the reward function and the stage-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Aldo Pacchiano , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Peter Bartlett

Adapting to a priori unknown noise level is a very important but challenging problem in sequential decision-making as efficient exploration typically requires knowledge of the noise level, which is often loosely specified. We report…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-11 Kwang-Sung Jun , Jungtaek Kim

We propose the first reduction-based approach to obtaining long-term memory guarantees for online learning in the sense of Bousquet and Warmuth, 2002, by reducing the problem to achieving typical switching regret. Specifically, for the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Kai Zheng , Haipeng Luo , Ilias Diakonikolas , Liwei Wang

Learning from human feedback plays an important role in aligning generative models, such as large language models (LLM). However, the effectiveness of this approach can be influenced by adversaries, who may intentionally provide misleading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Qiwei Di , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

In this paper, we study the problem of stochastic linear bandits with finite action sets. Most of existing work assume the payoffs are bounded or sub-Gaussian, which may be violated in some scenarios such as financial markets. To settle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-29 Bo Xue , Guanghui Wang , Yimu Wang , Lijun Zhang

In this paper, we improve the regret bound for online kernel selection under bandit feedback. Previous algorithm enjoys a $O((\Vert f\Vert^2_{\mathcal{H}_i}+1)K^{\frac{1}{3}}T^{\frac{2}{3}})$ expected bound for Lipschitz loss functions. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-24 Junfan Li , Shizhong Liao

This paper investigates the robustness of causal bandits (CBs) in the face of temporal model fluctuations. This setting deviates from the existing literature's widely-adopted assumption of constant causal models. The focus is on causal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-14 Zirui Yan , Arpan Mukherjee , Burak Varıcı , Ali Tajer