English
Related papers

Related papers: Exploration-free Algorithms for Multi-group Mean E…

200 papers

This paper introduces a general multi-agent bandit model in which each agent is facing a finite set of arms and may communicate with other agents through a central controller in order to identify, in pure exploration, or play, in regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-31 Clémence Réda , Sattar Vakili , Emilie Kaufmann

We study a multi-objective pure exploration problem in a multi-armed bandit model. Each arm is associated to an unknown multi-variate distribution and the goal is to identify the distributions whose mean is not uniformly worse than that of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-15 Cyrille Kone , Emilie Kaufmann , Laura Richert

We study the stochastic Multiplayer Multi-Armed Bandit (MMAB) problem, where multiple players select arms to maximize their cumulative rewards. Collisions occur when two or more players select the same arm, resulting in no reward, and are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Daoyuan Zhou , Xuchuang Wang , Lin Yang , Yang Gao

Online learning algorithms, widely used to power search and content optimization on the web, must balance exploration and exploitation, potentially sacrificing the experience of current users in order to gain information that will lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Manish Raghavan , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Jennifer Wortman Vaughan , Zhiwei Steven Wu

We consider the classic online learning and stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems, when at each step, the online policy can probe and find out which of a small number ($k$) of choices has better reward (or loss) before making its…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Aditya Bhaskara , Sreenivas Gollapudi , Sungjin Im , Kostas Kollias , Kamesh Munagala

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

Exploration is often necessary in online learning to maximize long-term reward, but it comes at the cost of short-term 'regret'. We study how this cost of exploration is shared across multiple groups. For example, in a clinical trial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-11 Jackie Baek , Vivek F. Farias

Much of the recent literature on bandit learning focuses on algorithms that aim to converge on an optimal action. One shortcoming is that this orientation does not account for time sensitivity, which can play a crucial role when learning an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-09 Daniel Russo , Benjamin Van Roy

In bandit settings, optimizing long-term regret metrics requires exploration, which corresponds to sometimes taking myopically sub-optimal actions. When a long-lived principal merely recommends actions to be executed by a sequence of…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Ramya Ramalingam , Osbert Bastani , Aaron Roth

We study the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem with composite and anonymous feedback. In this model, the reward of pulling an arm spreads over a period of time (we call this period as reward interval) and the player receives partial rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-16 Siwei Wang , Haoyun Wang , Longbo Huang

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

There is growing interest in improving our algorithmic understanding of fundamental statistical problems such as mean estimation, driven by the goal of understanding the limits of what we can extract from valuable data. The state of the art…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-11-22 Trung Dang , Jasper C. H. Lee , Maoyuan Song , Paul Valiant

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 consider a kernelized bandit problem with a compact arm set ${X} \subset \mathbb{R}^d $ and a fixed but unknown reward function $f^*$ with a finite norm in some Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). We propose a class of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Bingshan Hu , Zheng He , Danica J. Sutherland

Multi-armed bandits (MAB) model sequential decision making problems, in which a learner sequentially chooses arms with unknown reward distributions in order to maximize its cumulative reward. Most of the prior work on MAB assumes that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-22 Onur Atan , Cem Tekin , Mihaela van der Schaar

Traditional multi-armed bandit (MAB) formulations usually make certain assumptions about the underlying arms' distributions, such as bounds on the support or their tail behaviour. Moreover, such parametric information is usually 'baked'…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Anmol Kagrecha , Jayakrishnan Nair , Krishna Jagannathan

We consider the framework of stochastic multi-armed bandit problems and study the possibilities and limitations of forecasters that perform an on-line exploration of the arms. These forecasters are assessed in terms of their simple regret,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2010-07-26 Sébastien Bubeck , Rémi Munos , Gilles Stoltz

We propose a novel variant of the UCB algorithm (referred to as Efficient-UCB-Variance (EUCBV)) for minimizing cumulative regret in the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) setting. EUCBV incorporates the arm elimination strategy proposed in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-12 Subhojyoti Mukherjee , K. P. Naveen , Nandan Sudarsanam , Balaraman Ravindran

We consider a combinatorial generalization of the classical multi-armed bandit problem that is defined as follows. There is a given bipartite graph of $M$ users and $N \geq M$ resources. For each user-resource pair $(i,j)$, there is an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-03-17 Yi Gai , Bhaskar Krishnamachari , Mingyan Liu

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