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The piecewise-stationary bandit problem is an important variant of the multi-armed bandit problem that further considers abrupt changes in the reward distributions. The main theme of the problem is the trade-off between exploration for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Kuan-Ta Li , Ping-Chun Hsieh , Yu-Chih Huang

We consider a bandit problem where at any time, the decision maker can add new arms to her consideration set. A new arm is queried at a cost from an "arm-reservoir" containing finitely many "arm-types," each characterized by a distinct mean…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-10 Anand Kalvit , Assaf Zeevi

We introduce in this paper a new algorithm for Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problems. A machine learning paradigm popular within Cognitive Network related topics (e.g., Spectrum Sensing and Allocation). We focus on the case where the rewards…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2012-04-10 Wassim Jouini , Christophe Moy

In this paper, we investigate the impact of diverse user preference on learning under the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework. We aim to show that when the user preferences are sufficiently diverse and each arm can be optimal for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-11 Chao Gan , Jing Yang , Ruida Zhou , Cong Shen

In reinforcement learning, an agent interacts sequentially with an environment to maximize a reward, receiving only partial, probabilistic feedback. This creates a fundamental exploration-exploitation trade-off: the agent must explore to…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-27 Josep Lumbreras , Ruo Cheng Huang , Yanglin Hu , Marco Fanizza , Mile Gu

In this paper, we study Contextual Unsupervised Sequential Selection (USS), a new variant of the stochastic contextual bandits problem where the loss of an arm cannot be inferred from the observed feedback. In our setup, arms are associated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Arun Verma , Manjesh K. Hanawal , Csaba Szepesvári , Venkatesh Saligrama

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

Efficient selection among multiple generative models is increasingly important in modern generative AI, where sampling from suboptimal models is costly. This problem can be formulated as a multi-armed bandit task. Under diversity-aware…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Bahar Dibaei Nia , Farzan Farnia

A fundamental question in reinforcement learning is whether model-free algorithms are sample efficient. Recently, Jin et al. \cite{jin2018q} proposed a Q-learning algorithm with UCB exploration policy, and proved it has nearly optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-30 Kefan Dong , Yuanhao Wang , Xiaoyu Chen , Liwei Wang

We study replicable algorithms for stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB) and linear bandits with UCB (Upper Confidence Bound) based exploration. A bandit algorithm is $\rho$-replicable if two executions using shared internal randomness but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Rohan Deb , Udaya Ghai , Karan Singh , Arindam Banerjee

While learning in an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent should trade off exploration to discover new information about the MDP, and exploitation of the current knowledge to maximize the reward. Although the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Evrard Garcelon , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Alessandro Lazaric , Matteo Pirotta

Consider a requester who wishes to crowdsource a series of identical binary labeling tasks to a pool of workers so as to achieve an assured accuracy for each task, in a cost optimal way. The workers are heterogeneous with unknown but fixed…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-06-18 Shweta Jain , Sujit Gujar , Satyanath Bhat , Onno Zoeter , Y. Narahari

Keeping a memory of evolving stimuli is ubiquitous in biology, an example of which is immune memory for evolving pathogens. However, learning and memory storage for dynamic patterns still pose challenges in machine learning. Here, we…

Biological Physics · Physics 2021-10-29 Oskar H Schnaack , Luca Peliti , Armita Nourmohammad

There are two variants of the classical multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem that have received considerable attention from machine learning researchers in recent years: contextual bandits and simple regret minimization. Contextual bandits are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-27 Aniket Anand Deshmukh , Srinagesh Sharma , James W. Cutler , Mark Moldwin , Clayton Scott

We consider a novel multi-arm bandit (MAB) setup, where a learner needs to communicate the actions to distributed agents over erasure channels, while the rewards for the actions are directly available to the learner through external…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-27 Osama Hanna , Merve Karakas , Lin F. Yang , Christina Fragouli

Active learning provides a framework to adaptively query the most informative experiments towards learning an unknown black-box function. Various approaches of active learning have been proposed in the literature, however, they either focus…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Upala Junaida Islam , Kamran Paynabar , George Runger , Ashif Sikandar Iquebal

We study collaborative learning in multi-agent Bayesian bandit problems, where strategic agents collectively solve the same bandit instance. While multiple agents can accelerate learning by sharing information, strategic agents might prefer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Idan Barnea , Ofir Schlisselberg , Yishay Mansour

The Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem is challenging in non-stationary environments where reward distributions evolve dynamically. We introduce RAVEN-UCB, a novel algorithm that combines theoretical rigor with practical efficiency via…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Junyi Fang , Yuxun Chen , Yuxin Chen , Chen Zhang

One of the challenges in online reinforcement learning (RL) is that the agent needs to trade off the exploration of the environment and the exploitation of the samples to optimize its behavior. Whether we optimize for regret, sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-19 Jean Tarbouriech , Matteo Pirotta , Michal Valko , Alessandro Lazaric

We consider a sequential decision-making problem where an agent can take one action at a time and each action has a stochastic temporal extent, i.e., a new action cannot be taken until the previous one is finished. Upon completion, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-26 P Sharoff , Nishant A. Mehta , Ravi Ganti