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Stochastic linear bandits are a fundamental model for sequential decision making, where an agent selects a vector-valued action and receives a noisy reward with expected value given by an unknown linear function. Although well studied in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Bruce Huang , Ruida Zhou , Lin F. Yang , Suhas Diggavi

Thompson sampling (TS) is a powerful and widely used strategy for sequential decision-making, with applications ranging from Bayesian optimization to reinforcement learning (RL). Despite its success, the theoretical foundations of TS remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Jasmine Bayrooti , Sattar Vakili , Amanda Prorok , Carl Henrik Ek

We study stochastic linear optimization problem with bandit feedback. The set of arms take values in an $N$-dimensional space and belong to a bounded polyhedron described by finitely many linear inequalities. We provide a lower bound for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-09-29 Manjesh K. Hanawal , Amir Leshem , Venkatesh Saligrama

We obtain essentially tight upper bounds for a strengthened notion of regret in the stochastic linear bandits framework. The strengthening -- referred to as Nash regret -- is defined as the difference between the (a priori unknown) optimum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Ayush Sawarni , Soumybrata Pal , Siddharth Barman

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 the thresholding bandit problem, whose goal is to find arms of mean rewards above a given threshold $\theta$, with a fixed budget of $T$ trials. We introduce LSA, a new, simple and anytime algorithm that aims to minimize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Chao Tao , Saùl Blanco , Jian Peng , Yuan Zhou

We consider the combinatorial bandits problem, where at each time step, the online learner selects a size-$k$ subset $s$ from the arms set $\mathcal{A}$, where $\left|\mathcal{A}\right| = n$, and observes a stochastic reward of each arm in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-05 Shuo Yang , Tongzheng Ren , Inderjit S. Dhillon , Sujay Sanghavi

This paper studies the Bayesian regret of a variant of the Thompson-Sampling algorithm for bandit problems. It builds upon the information-theoretic framework of [Russo and Van Roy, 2015] and, more specifically, on the rate-distortion…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-07 Amaury Gouverneur , Borja Rodríguez-Gálvez , Tobias J. Oechtering , Mikael Skoglund

The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a ubiquitous decision-making problem that exemplifies the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. Standard formulations exclude risk in decision making. Risk notably complicates the basic reward-maximising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-05 Joel Q. L. Chang , Qiuyu Zhu , Vincent Y. F. Tan

Simple regret is a natural and parameter-free performance criterion for pure exploration in multi-armed bandits yet is less popular than the probability of missing the best arm or an $\epsilon$-good arm, perhaps due to lack of easy ways to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-03 Yao Zhao , Connor James Stephens , Csaba Szepesvári , Kwang-Sung Jun

We study a decentralized cooperative multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem with $K$ arms and $N$ agents connected over a network. In our model, each arm's reward distribution is same for all agents, and rewards are drawn independently…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-29 Anusha Lalitha , Andrea Goldsmith

This paper is in the field of stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits (MABs), i.e. those sequential selection techniques able to learn online using only the feedback given by the chosen option (a.k.a. $arm$). We study a particular case of the rested…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-28 Marco Fiandri , Alberto Maria Metelli , Francesco Trov`o

We propose algorithms based on a multi-level Thompson sampling scheme, for the stochastic multi-armed bandit and its contextual variant with linear expected rewards, in the setting where arms are clustered. We show, both theoretically and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Emil Carlsson , Devdatt Dubhashi , Fredrik D. Johansson

We consider regret minimization in a general collaborative multi-agent multi-armed bandit model, in which each agent faces a finite set of arms and may communicate with other agents through a central controller. The optimal arm for each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Amitis Shidani , Sattar Vakili

In this work, we extend the concept of the $p$-mean welfare objective from social choice theory (Moulin 2004) to study $p$-mean regret in stochastic multi-armed bandit problems. The $p$-mean regret, defined as the difference between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Anand Krishna , Philips George John , Adarsh Barik , Vincent Y. F. Tan

In this paper we investigate the problem of stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB) in the (local) differential privacy (DP/LDP) model. Unlike previous results that assume bounded/sub-Gaussian reward distributions, we focus on the setting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-25 Youming Tao , Yulian Wu , Peng Zhao , Di Wang

In this paper we consider the contextual multi-armed bandit problem for linear payoffs under a risk-averse criterion. At each round, contexts are revealed for each arm, and the decision maker chooses one arm to pull and receives the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Yifan Lin , Yuhao Wang , Enlu Zhou

During online decision making in Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB), one needs to conduct inference on the true mean reward of each arm based on data collected so far at each step. However, since the arms are adaptively selected--thereby yielding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-29 Maria Dimakopoulou , Zhimei Ren , Zhengyuan Zhou

In this study, we propose a new method for constructing UCB-type algorithms for stochastic multi-armed bandits based on general convex optimization methods with an inexact oracle. We derive the regret bounds corresponding to the convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Yuriy Dorn , Aleksandr Katrutsa , Ilgam Latypov , Andrey Pudovikov

Thompson sampling (TS) has optimal regret and excellent empirical performance in multi-armed bandit problems. Yet, in Bayesian optimization, TS underperforms popular acquisition functions (e.g., EI, UCB). TS samples arms according to the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-02 David Sweet