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We design and implement an adaptive experiment (a ``contextual bandit'') to learn a targeted treatment assignment policy, where the goal is to use a participant's survey responses to determine which charity to expose them to in a donation…

In this work, we address the open problem of finding low-complexity near-optimal multi-armed bandit algorithms for sequential decision making problems. Existing bandit algorithms are either sub-optimal and computationally simple (e.g.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-18 Fang Liu , Sinong Wang , Swapna Buccapatnam , Ness Shroff

We propose the kl-UCB ++ algorithm for regret minimization in stochastic bandit models with exponential families of distributions. We prove that it is simultaneously asymptotically optimal (in the sense of Lai and Robbins' lower bound) and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-09-21 Pierre Ménard , Aurélien Garivier

Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) method is arguably the most celebrated one used in online decision making with partial information feedback. Existing techniques for constructing confidence bounds are typically built upon various concentration…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-01 Botao Hao , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Zheng Wen , Guang Cheng

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

We study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in the case when the arm samples are dependent over time and generated from so-called weak $\cC$-mixing processes. We establish a $\cC-$Mix Improved UCB agorithm and provide both…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-26 Oleksandr Zadorozhnyi , Gilles Blanchard , Alexandra Carpentier

We study a new type of K-armed bandit problem where the expected return of one arm may depend on the returns of other arms. We present a new algorithm for this general class of problems and show that under certain circumstances it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-11-12 Tor Lattimore , Remi Munos

We provide a simple method to combine stochastic bandit algorithms. Our approach is based on a "meta-UCB" procedure that treats each of $N$ individual bandit algorithms as arms in a higher-level $N$-armed bandit problem that we solve with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Ashok Cutkosky , Abhimanyu Das , Manish Purohit

We consider contextual bandit learning under distribution shift when reward vectors are ordered according to a given preference cone. We propose an adaptive-discretization and optimistic elimination based policy that self-tunes to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Apurv Shukla , P. R. Kumar

Heavy-tailed distributions naturally arise in several settings, from finance to telecommunications. While regret minimization under subgaussian or bounded rewards has been widely studied, learning with heavy-tailed distributions only gained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Gianmarco Genalti , Lupo Marsigli , Nicola Gatti , Alberto Maria Metelli

In this paper, we study the behavior of the Upper Confidence Bound-Variance (UCB-V) algorithm for the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problems, a variant of the canonical Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithm that incorporates variance estimates…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-18 Yingying Fan , Yuxuan Han , Jinchi Lv , Xiaocong Xu , Zhengyuan Zhou

In this paper, we formulate the multi-agent graph bandit problem as a multi-agent extension of the graph bandit problem introduced by Zhang, Johansson, and Li [CISS 57, 1-6 (2023)]. In our formulation, $N$ cooperative agents travel on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Phevos Paschalidis , Runyu Zhang , Na Li

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

Transfer learning seeks to accelerate sequential decision-making by leveraging offline data from related agents. However, data from heterogeneous sources that differ in observed features, distributions, or unobserved confounders often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Xueping Gong , Wei You , Jiheng Zhang

In this paper, we study a family of conservative bandit problems (CBPs) with sample-path reward constraints, i.e., the learner's reward performance must be at least as well as a given baseline at any time. We propose a One-Size-Fits-All…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-08 Yihan Du , Siwei Wang , Longbo Huang

The adversarial Bandit with Knapsack problem is a multi-armed bandits problem with budget constraints and adversarial rewards and costs. In each round, a learner selects an action to take and observes the reward and cost of the selected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Mark Braverman , Jingyi Liu , Jieming Mao , Jon Schneider , Eric Xue

We consider stochastic non-stationary linear bandits where the linear parameter connecting contexts to the reward changes over time. Existing algorithms in this setting localize the policy by gradually discarding or down-weighting past…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-05 Margherita Lazzaretto , Jonas Peters , Niklas Pfister

We consider a resource-aware variant of the classical multi-armed bandit problem: In each round, the learner selects an arm and determines a resource limit. It then observes a corresponding (random) reward, provided the (random) amount of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Viktor Bengs , Eyke Hüllermeier

Contextual multi-armed bandits (CMAB) have been widely used for learning to filter and prioritize information according to a user's interest. In this work, we analyze top-K ranking under the CMAB framework where the top-K arms are chosen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-31 Michael Rawson , Jade Freeman

Learning good interventions in a causal graph can be modelled as a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with side-information. First, we study this problem when interventions are more expensive than observations and a budget is specified.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-15 Vineet Nair , Vishakha Patil , Gaurav Sinha