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We study an online learning problem with long-term budget constraints in the adversarial setting. In this problem, at each round $t$, the learner selects an action from a convex decision set, after which the adversary reveals a cost…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Dhruv Sarkar , Samrat Mukhopadhyay , Abhishek Sinha

The rapid proliferation of learning systems in an arbitrarily changing environment mandates the need for managing tensions between exploration and exploitation. This work proposes a quantum-inspired bandit learning approach for the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-05-23 Byungjin Cho , Yu Xiao , Pan Hui , Daoyi Dong

Optimal decision tree (\odt) is a fundamental problem arising in applications such as active learning, entity identification, and medical diagnosis. An instance of \odt is given by $m$ hypotheses, out of which an unknown ``true'' hypothesis…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Zhengjia Zhuo , Viswanath Nagarajan

We introduce the functional bandit problem, where the objective is to find an arm that optimises a known functional of the unknown arm-reward distributions. These problems arise in many settings such as maximum entropy methods in natural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-05-13 Long Tran-Thanh , Jia Yuan Yu

The improving multi-armed bandits problem is a formal model for allocating effort under uncertainty, motivated by scenarios such as investing research effort into new technologies, performing clinical trials, and hyperparameter selection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Avrim Blum , Marten Garicano , Kavya Ravichandran , Dravyansh Sharma

Stochastic bandit algorithms are usually analyzed under a mean-reward criterion, yet many problems favor arms with strong upper-tail performance, which we study herein. For a fixed miscoverage level \(\alpha\), the natural upper-tail target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Chengyu Du , Mengfan Xu

Conformal prediction has emerged as an effective strategy for uncertainty quantification by modifying a model to output sets of labels instead of a single label. These prediction sets come with the guarantee that they contain the true label…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Haosen Ge , Hamsa Bastani , Osbert Bastani

Frequent pattern (itemset) mining in transactional databases is one of the most well-studied problems in data mining. One obstacle that limits the practical usage of frequent pattern mining is the extremely large number of patterns…

Databases · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Zengyou He

We study the $\textit{single-index bandit}$ problem, where rewards depend on an unknown one-dimensional projection of high-dimensional contexts through an unknown reward function. This model extends linear and generalized linear bandits to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-12 Devdan Dey , Sujoy Bhore , Avishek Ghosh

This paper considers the problem of online clustering with bandit feedback. A set of arms (or items) can be partitioned into various groups that are unknown. Within each group, the observations associated to each of the arms follow the same…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Junwen Yang , Zixin Zhong , Vincent Y. F. Tan

In many real-world applications such as business planning and sensor data monitoring, one important, yet challenging, the task is to rank objects(e.g., products, documents, or spatial objects) based on their ranking scores and efficiently…

Databases · Computer Science 2021-05-14 Niranjan Rai , Xiang Lian

Motivated by applications in crowdsourced entity resolution in database, signed edge prediction in social networks and correlation clustering, Mazumdar and Saha [NIPS 2017] proposed an elegant theoretical model for studying clustering with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Pan Peng , Jiapeng Zhang

We present a new algorithm for the contextual bandit learning problem, where the learner repeatedly takes one of $K$ actions in response to the observed context, and observes the reward only for that chosen action. Our method assumes access…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-10-15 Alekh Agarwal , Daniel Hsu , Satyen Kale , John Langford , Lihong Li , Robert E. Schapire

In the budgeted learning problem, we are allowed to experiment on a set of alternatives (given a fixed experimentation budget) with the goal of picking a single alternative with the largest possible expected payoff. Approximation algorithms…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-04-12 Ashish Goel , Sanjeev Khanna , Brad Null

In this paper we consider the problem of online stochastic optimization of a locally smooth function under bandit feedback. We introduce the high-confidence tree (HCT) algorithm, a novel any-time $\mathcal{X}$-armed bandit algorithm, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-05-20 Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar , Alessandro Lazaric , Emma Brunskill

The restless bandit problem is one of the most well-studied generalizations of the celebrated stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory. In its ultimate generality, the restless bandit problem is known to be PSPACE-Hard to…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2009-02-03 Sudipto Guha , Kamesh Munagala , Peng Shi

We propose stochastic rank-$1$ bandits, a class of online learning problems where at each step a learning agent chooses a pair of row and column arms, and receives the product of their values as a reward. The main challenge of the problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-09 Sumeet Katariya , Branislav Kveton , Csaba Szepesvari , Claire Vernade , Zheng Wen

A major problem of unstructured P2P systems is their heavy network traffic. This is caused mainly by high numbers of query answers, many of which are irrelevant for users. One solution to this problem is to use Top-k queries whereby the…

Databases · Computer Science 2009-09-15 Reza Akbarinia , Esther Pacitti , Patrick Valduriez

The target of $\mathcal{X}$-armed bandit problem is to find the global maximum of an unknown stochastic function $f$, given a finite budget of $n$ evaluations. Recently, $\mathcal{X}$-armed bandits have been widely used in many situations.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-10-27 Cheng Chen , Shuang Liu , Zhihua Zhang , Wu-Jun Li

We propose an extensible deep learning method that uses reinforcement learning to train neural networks for offline ranking in information retrieval (IR). We call our method BanditRank as it treats ranking as a contextual bandit problem. In…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-10-24 Phanideep Gampa , Sumio Fujita