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Non-stationary multi-armed bandits (NS-MABs) model sequential decision-making problems in which the expected rewards of a set of actions, a.k.a.~arms, evolve over time. In this paper, we fill a gap in the literature by providing a novel…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-17 Marco Fiandri , Alberto Maria Metelli , Francesco Trovò

Despite the significant interest and progress in reinforcement learning (RL) problems with adversarial corruption, current works are either confined to the linear setting or lead to an undesired $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T}\zeta)$ regret bound,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-13 Chenlu Ye , Wei Xiong , Quanquan Gu , Tong Zhang

In this paper, we aim to build a novel bandits algorithm that is capable of fully harnessing the power of multi-dimensional data and the inherent non-linearity of reward functions to provide high-usable and accountable decision-making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Qianxin Yi , Yiyang Yang , Shaojie Tang , Jiapeng Liu , Yao Wang

Generalized linear bandits have been extensively studied due to their broad applicability in real-world online decision-making problems. However, these methods typically assume that the expected reward function is known to the users, an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-10 Yue Kang , Mingshuo Liu , Bongsoo Yi , Jing Lyu , Zhi Zhang , Doudou Zhou , Yao Li

Cascading bandit (CB) is a popular model for web search and online advertising, where an agent aims to learn the $K$ most attractive items out of a ground set of size $L$ during the interaction with a user. However, the stationary CB model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-18 Lingda Wang , Huozhi Zhou , Bingcong Li , Lav R. Varshney , Zhizhen Zhao

We study high-dimensional multi-armed contextual bandits with batched feedback where the $T$ steps of online interactions are divided into $L$ batches. In specific, each batch collects data according to a policy that depends on previous…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-27 Jianqing Fan , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Chenlu Ye

In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, instance-dependent algorithms attain improved performance on "easy" problems with a gap between the best and second-best arm. Are similar guarantees possible for contextual bandits? While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin , David Simchi-Levi , Yunzong Xu

In this paper, we revisit the regret minimization problem in sparse stochastic contextual linear bandits, where feature vectors may be of large dimension $d$, but where the reward function depends on a few, say $s_0\ll d$, of these features…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-22 Kaito Ariu , Kenshi Abe , Alexandre Proutière

This paper studies semiparametric contextual bandits, a generalization of the linear stochastic bandit problem where the reward for an action is modeled as a linear function of known action features confounded by an non-linear…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-17 Akshay Krishnamurthy , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Vasilis Syrgkanis

Thanks to the power of representation learning, neural contextual bandit algorithms demonstrate remarkable performance improvement against their classical counterparts. But because their exploration has to be performed in the entire neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Yiling Jia , Weitong Zhang , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu , Hongning Wang

Thompson sampling (TS) has been known for its outstanding empirical performance supported by theoretical guarantees across various reward models in the classical stochastic multi-armed bandit problems. Nonetheless, its optimality is often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Jongyeong Lee , Chao-Kai Chiang , Masashi Sugiyama

We establish strong laws of large numbers and central limit theorems for the regret of two of the most popular bandit algorithms: Thompson sampling and UCB. Here, our characterizations of the regret distribution complement the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Lin Fan , Peter W. Glynn

We study the dynamic regret of multi-armed bandit and experts problem in non-stationary stochastic environments. We introduce a new parameter $\Lambda$, which measures the total statistical variance of the loss distributions over $T$ rounds…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-24 Chen-Yu Wei , Yi-Te Hong , Chi-Jen Lu

We here adopt Bayesian nonparametric mixture models to extend multi-armed bandits in general, and Thompson sampling in particular, to scenarios where there is reward model uncertainty. In the stochastic multi-armed bandit, the reward for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-08-26 Iñigo Urteaga , Chris H. Wiggins

Many applications require optimizing an unknown, noisy function that is expensive to evaluate. We formalize this task as a multi-armed bandit problem, where the payoff function is either sampled from a Gaussian process (GP) or has low RKHS…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-13 Niranjan Srinivas , Andreas Krause , Sham M. Kakade , Matthias Seeger

We present improved algorithms with worst-case regret guarantees for the stochastic linear bandit problem. The widely used "optimism in the face of uncertainty" principle reduces a stochastic bandit problem to the construction of a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-09-06 Hamish Flynn , David Reeb , Melih Kandemir , Jan Peters

We consider the problem of model selection for the general stochastic contextual bandits under the realizability assumption. We propose a successive refinement based algorithm called Adaptive Contextual Bandit ({\ttfamily ACB}), that works…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-21 Avishek Ghosh , Abishek Sankararaman , Kannan Ramchandran

We provide an approach for the analysis of randomised exploration algorithms like Thompson sampling that does not rely on forced optimism or posterior inflation. With this, we demonstrate that in the $d$-dimensional linear bandit setting,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Marc Abeille , David Janz , Ciara Pike-Burke

We study the tail behavior of regret in stochastic multi-armed bandits for algorithms that are asymptotically optimal in expectation. While minimizing expected regret is the classical objective, recent work shows that even such algorithms…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Subhodip Panda , Shubhada Agrawal

We consider the problem of contextual bandits and imitation learning, where the learner lacks direct knowledge of the executed action's reward. Instead, the learner can actively query an expert at each round to compare two actions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan , Wen Sun , Runzhe Wu