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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 problems have been studied mainly under the measure of expected total reward accrued over a horizon of length $T$. In this paper, we address the issue of risk in multi-armed bandit problems and develop parallel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-16 Sattar Vakili , Qing Zhao

In decision-making problems such as the multi-armed bandit, an agent learns sequentially by optimizing a certain feedback. While the mean reward criterion has been extensively studied, other measures that reflect an aversion to adverse…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-03-28 Patrick Saux , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard

We study fixed budget constrained best-arm identification in grouped bandits, where each arm consists of multiple independent attributes with stochastic rewards. An arm is considered feasible only if all its attributes' means are above a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Raunak Mukherjee , Sharayu Moharir

Mode estimation is a classical problem in statistics with a wide range of applications in machine learning. Despite this, there is little understanding in its robustness properties under possibly adversarial data contamination. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-09 Aldo Pacchiano , Heinrich Jiang , Michael I. Jordan

In this paper we consider the problem of best-arm identification in multi-armed bandits in the fixed confidence setting, where the goal is to identify, with probability $1-\delta$ for some $\delta>0$, the arm with the highest mean reward in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-09-13 Samarth Gupta , Gauri Joshi , Osman Yağan

We study the Improving Multi-Armed Bandit (IMAB) problem, where the reward obtained from an arm increases with the number of pulls it receives. This model provides an elegant abstraction for many real-world problems in domains such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-22 Vishakha Patil , Vineet Nair , Ganesh Ghalme , Arindam Khan

We study the Pareto Set Identification (PSI) problem in a structured multi-output linear bandit model. In this setting, each arm is associated a feature vector belonging to $\mathbb{R}^h$, and its mean vector in $\mathbb{R}^d$ linearly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-08 Cyrille Kone , Emilie Kaufmann , Laura Richert

Multi armed bandit (MAB) algorithms have been increasingly used to complement or integrate with A/B tests and randomized clinical trials in e-commerce, healthcare, and policymaking. Recent developments incorporate possible delayed feedback.…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-07-04 Lei Shi , Jingshen Wang , Tianhao Wu

Sharpe Ratio (SR) is a critical parameter in characterizing financial time series as it jointly considers the reward and the volatility of any stock/portfolio through its variance. Deriving online algorithms for optimizing the SR is…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2024-06-12 Sabrina Khurshid , Mohammed Shahid Abdulla , Gourab Ghatak

In the classic Bayesian restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problem, there are $N$ arms, with rewards on all arms evolving at each time as Markov chains with known parameters. A player seeks to activate $K \geq 1$ arms at each time in order…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2011-12-25 Wenhan Dai , Yi Gai , Bhaskar Krishnamachari , Qing Zhao

Quantum reinforcement learning has emerged as a framework combining quantum computation with sequential decision-making, and applications to the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem have been reported. The graph bandit problem extends the MAB…

Motivated by models of human decision making proposed to explain commonly observed deviations from conventional expected value preferences, we formulate two stochastic multi-armed bandit problems with distorted probabilities on the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Ravi Kumar Kolla , Prashanth L. A. , Aditya Gopalan , Krishna Jagannathan , Michael Fu , Steve Marcus

We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting and study the problem of constrained regret minimization over a given time horizon. Each arm is associated with an unknown, possibly multi-dimensional distribution, and the merit of an arm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Anmol Kagrecha , Jayakrishnan Nair , Krishna Jagannathan

We consider minimisation of dynamic regret in non-stationary bandits with a slowly varying property. Namely, we assume that arms' rewards are stochastic and independent over time, but that the absolute difference between the expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Ramakrishnan Krishnamurthy , Aditya Gopalan

Motivated by privacy concerns in sequential decision-making on sensitive data, we address the challenge of nonparametric contextual multi-armed bandits (MAB) under local differential privacy (LDP). We develop a uniform-confidence-bound-type…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-26 Yuheng Ma , Feiyu Jiang , Zifeng Zhao , Hanfang Yang , Yi Yu

The Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) framework highlights the tension between acquiring new knowledge (Exploration) and leveraging available knowledge (Exploitation). In the classical MAB problem, a decision maker must choose an arm at each time…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-03 Nir Levine , Koby Crammer , Shie Mannor

The 1-identification problem is a fundamental pure-exploration problem in multi-armed bandits. An agent aims to determine whether there exists an arm whose mean reward exceeds a known threshold $\mu_0$, or to output \textsf{None} otherwise.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Zitian Li , Wang Chi Cheung

Many real-world functions are defined over both categorical and category-specific continuous variables and thus cannot be optimized by traditional Bayesian optimization (BO) methods. To optimize such functions, we propose a new method that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-02 Dang Nguyen , Sunil Gupta , Santu Rana , Alistair Shilton , Svetha Venkatesh

In a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem a gambler needs to choose at each round of play one of K arms, each characterized by an unknown reward distribution. Reward realizations are only observed when an arm is selected, and the gambler's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Omar Besbes , Yonatan Gur , Assaf Zeevi