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A key goal in stochastic contextual linear bandits is to efficiently learn a near-optimal policy. Prior algorithms for this problem learn a policy by strategically sampling actions but naively (passively) sampling contexts from the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Emma Brunskill , Ishani Karmarkar , Zhaoqi Li

Contextual bandits have emerged as a cornerstone in reinforcement learning, enabling systems to make decisions with partial feedback. However, as contexts grow in complexity, traditional bandit algorithms can face challenges in adequately…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Ali Baheri , Cecilia O. Alm

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

We study the problem of federated stochastic multi-arm contextual bandits with unknown contexts, in which M agents are faced with different bandits and collaborate to learn. The communication model consists of a central server and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Jiabin Lin , Shana Moothedath

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

In stochastic contextual bandits, an agent sequentially makes actions from a time-dependent action set based on past experience to minimize the cumulative regret. Like many other machine learning algorithms, the performance of bandits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Yue Kang , Cho-Jui Hsieh , Thomas C. M. Lee

We study the restless contextual multi-play multi-armed bandit (MP-MAB) problem for channel allocation in the opportunity spectrum access (OSA) scenario. Most existing MP-MAB methods are impractical for real-world OSA systems as they assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Ruiyu Li , Guangxia Li , Xiao Lu , Jichao Liu , Yan Jin

When an AI system interacts with multiple users, it frequently needs to make allocation decisions. For instance, a virtual agent decides whom to pay attention to in a group setting, or a factory robot selects a worker to deliver a part.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-18 Yifang Chen , Alex Cuellar , Haipeng Luo , Jignesh Modi , Heramb Nemlekar , Stefanos Nikolaidis

In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, instance-dependent algorithms attain improved performance on "easy" problems with a gap between the best and second-best arm. Are similar guarantees possible for contextual bandits? While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin , David Simchi-Levi , Yunzong Xu

Large language models (LLMs) have been adopted to solve sequential decision-making tasks such as multi-armed bandits (MAB), in which an LLM is directly instructed to select the arms to pull in every iteration. However, this paradigm of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Jiahang Sun , Zhiyong Wang , Runhan Yang , Chenjun Xiao , John C. S. Lui , Zhongxiang Dai

We propose a new framework for contextual multi-armed bandits based on tree ensembles. Our framework adapts two widely used bandit methods, Upper Confidence Bound and Thompson Sampling, for both standard and combinatorial settings. As part…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Hannes Nilsson , Rikard Johansson , Niklas Åkerblom , Morteza Haghir Chehreghani

Many sequential decision-making problems in communication networks can be modeled as contextual bandit problems, which are natural extensions of the well-known multi-armed bandit problem. In contextual bandit problems, at each time, an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-10 Pranav Sakulkar , Bhaskar Krishnamachari

To address the contextual bandit problem, we propose an online random forest algorithm. The analysis of the proposed algorithm is based on the sample complexity needed to find the optimal decision stump. Then, the decision stumps are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-09-16 Raphaël Féraud , Robin Allesiardo , Tanguy Urvoy , Fabrice Clérot

We propose an efficient Context-Aware clustering of Bandits (CAB) algorithm, which can capture collaborative effects. CAB can be easily deployed in a real-world recommendation system, where multi-armed bandits have been shown to perform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-28 Shuai Li , Purushottam Kar

A challenging aspect of the bandit problem is that a stochastic reward is observed only for the chosen arm and the rewards of other arms remain missing. The dependence of the arm choice on the past context and reward pairs compounds the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-02 Wonyoung Kim , Gi-soo Kim , Myunghee Cho Paik

We consider a sequential subset selection problem under parameter uncertainty, where at each time step, the decision maker selects a subset of cardinality $K$ from $N$ possible items (arms), and observes a (bandit) feedback in the form of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-07 Shipra Agrawal , Vashist Avadhanula , Vineet Goyal , Assaf Zeevi

Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving real-world decision making problems. In practice, collecting a contextual bandit's feedback from different domains may involve different costs. For example, measuring drug reaction from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Ziyan Wang , Xiaoming Huo , Hao Wang

We study the benefits of sparsity in nonparametric contextual bandit problems, in which the set of candidate features is countably or uncountably infinite. Our contribution is two-fold. First, using a novel reduction to sequences of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-16 Hamish Flynn , Julia Olkhovskaya , Paul Rognon-Vael

Multi-armed bandit algorithms have become a reference solution for handling the explore/exploit dilemma in recommender systems, and many other important real-world problems, such as display advertisement. However, such algorithms usually…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-25 Qingyun Wu , Naveen Iyer , Hongning Wang

Model selection in contextual bandits is an important complementary problem to regret minimization with respect to a fixed model class. We consider the simplest non-trivial instance of model-selection: distinguishing a simple multi-armed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-01 Vidya Muthukumar , Akshay Krishnamurthy