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Related papers: Valid Post-Contextual Bandit Inference

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We examine a multi-armed bandit problem with contextual information, where the objective is to ensure that each arm receives a minimum aggregated reward across contexts while simultaneously maximizing the total cumulative reward. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Ahmed Ben Yahmed , Hafedh El Ferchichi , Marc Abeille , Vianney Perchet

Early-phase clinical trials face the challenge of selecting optimal drug doses that balance safety and efficacy due to uncertain dose-response relationships and varied participant characteristics. Traditional randomized dose allocation…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-13 Rohit Kanrar , Chunlin Li , Zara Ghodsi , Margaret Gamalo

Adaptive experiments are used extensively in online platforms, healthcare and biotechnology, and a variety of other settings. In many of these applications, the main goal is not to precisely estimate a treatment effect, but to demonstrate…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Guido Imbens , Lorenzo Masoero , Alexander Rakhlin , Thomas S. Richardson , Suhas Vijaykumar

We consider a bandit problem which involves sequential sampling from two populations (arms). Each arm produces a noisy reward realization which depends on an observable random covariate. The goal is to maximize cumulative expected reward.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2010-03-09 Philippe Rigollet , Assaf Zeevi

We present the first high-probability optimal regret bound for a policy optimization technique applied to the problem of stochastic contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) with general offline function approximation. Our algorithm is both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Orin Levy , Yishay Mansour

The multi-armed bandit problem is a core framework for sequential decision-making under uncertainty, but classical algorithms often fail in environments with hidden, time-varying states that confound reward estimation and optimal action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Jikai Jin , Kenneth Hung , Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Baoyi Shi , Congshan Zhang

Motivated by problems in search and detection we present a solution to a Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit (CMAB) problem with both heavy-tailed reward distributions and a new class of feedback, filtered semibandit feedback. In a CMAB…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-29 James A. Grant , David S. Leslie , Kevin Glazebrook , Roberto Szechtman

We study the stochastic Budgeted Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem, where a player chooses from $K$ arms with unknown expected rewards and costs. The goal is to maximize the total reward under a budget constraint. A player thus seeks to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-16 Marco Heyden , Vadim Arzamasov , Edouard Fouché , Klemens Böhm

We study the non-stationary stochastic multiarmed bandit (MAB) problem and propose two generic algorithms, namely, the limited memory deterministic sequencing of exploration and exploitation (LM-DSEE) and the Sliding-Window Upper Confidence…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-04-25 Lai Wei , Vaibhav Srivastava

The deployment of Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) has become commonplace in many economic applications. However, regret guarantees for even state-of-the-art linear bandit algorithms (such as Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty Linear bandit…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-02-28 Jingwen Zhang , Yifang Chen , Amandeep Singh

We consider the stochastic linear contextual bandit problem with high-dimensional features. We analyze the Thompson sampling algorithm using special classes of sparsity-inducing priors (e.g., spike-and-slab) to model the unknown parameter…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-31 Sunrit Chakraborty , Saptarshi Roy , Ambuj Tewari

Contextual bandit algorithms have transformed modern experimentation by enabling real-time adaptation for personalized treatment and efficient use of data. Yet these advantages create challenges for statistical inference due to adaptivity.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-09-23 Yongyi Guo , Ziping Xu

We investigate the problem of stochastic, combinatorial multi-armed bandits where the learner only has access to bandit feedback and the reward function can be non-linear. We provide a general framework for adapting discrete offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Guanyu Nie , Yididiya Y Nadew , Yanhui Zhu , Vaneet Aggarwal , Christopher John Quinn

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 introduce a new variant of contextual multi-armed bandits (CMABs) called observation-augmented CMABs (OA-CMABs) wherein a robot uses extra outcome observations from an external information source, e.g. humans. In OA-CMABs, external…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Shohei Wakayama , Nisar Ahmed

We study an important variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, which takes penalization into consideration. Instead of directly maximizing cumulative expected reward, we need to balance between the total reward and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-16 Guanhua Fang , Ping Li , Gennady Samorodnitsky

The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a classical learning task that exemplifies the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. However, standard formulations do not take into account {\em risk}. In online decision making systems, risk is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Qiuyu Zhu , Vincent Y. F. Tan

The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a classic example of the exploration-exploitation dilemma. It is concerned with maximising the total rewards for a gambler by sequentially pulling an arm from a multi-armed slot machine where each arm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-16 Xue Lu , Niall Adams , Nikolas Kantas

Many real-world problems like Social Influence Maximization face the dilemma of choosing the best $K$ out of $N$ options at a given time instant. This setup can be modeled as a combinatorial bandit which chooses $K$ out of $N$ arms at each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-12 Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal , Christopher J. Quinn , Abhishek K. Umrawal

We consider a novel formulation of the multi-armed bandit model, which we call the contextual bandit with restricted context, where only a limited number of features can be accessed by the learner at every iteration. This novel formulation…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-06-09 Djallel Bouneffouf , Irina Rish , Guillermo A. Cecchi , Raphael Feraud