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We investigate the problem of cumulative regret minimization for individual sequence prediction with respect to the best expert in a finite family of size K under limited access to information. We assume that in each round, the learner can…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-10-06 El Mehdi Saad , G. Blanchard

Risk-sensitive linear quadratic regulator is one of the most fundamental problems in risk-sensitive optimal control. In this paper, we study online adaptive control of risk-sensitive linear quadratic regulator in the finite horizon episodic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Wenhao Xu , Xuefeng Gao , Xuedong He

We study the problem of stochastic contextual bandits in the agnostic setting, where the goal is to compete with the best policy in a given class without assuming realizability or imposing model restrictions on losses or rewards. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-06 Samuel Girard , Aurelien Bibaut , Arthur Gretton , Nathan Kallus , Houssam Zenati

This work studies the problem of sequential control in an unknown, nonlinear dynamical system, where we model the underlying system dynamics as an unknown function in a known Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space. This framework yields a general…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Sham Kakade , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Kendall Lowrey , Motoya Ohnishi , Wen Sun

We consider the following variant of contextual linear bandits motivated by routing applications in navigational engines and recommendation systems. We wish to learn a hidden $d$-dimensional value $w^*$. Every round, we are presented with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-10 Sreenivas Gollapudi , Guru Guruganesh , Kostas Kollias , Pasin Manurangsi , Renato Paes Leme , Jon Schneider

We study online learning with oblivious losses and delays under a novel ``capacity constraint'' that limits how many past rounds can be tracked simultaneously for delayed feedback. Under ``clairvoyance'' (i.e., delay durations are revealed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Alexander Ryabchenko , Idan Attias , Daniel M. Roy

We study the Pandora's Box problem in an online learning setting with semi-bandit feedback. In each round, the learner sequentially pays to open up to $n$ boxes with unknown reward distributions, observes rewards upon opening, and decides…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Junyan Liu , Ziyun Chen , Kun Wang , Haipeng Luo , Lillian J. Ratliff

Reinforcement learning (RL) has traditionally been understood from an episodic perspective; the concept of non-episodic RL, where there is no restart and therefore no reliable recovery, remains elusive. A fundamental question in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-31 Shuang Liu , Hao Su

We investigate online convex optimization in non-stationary environments and choose dynamic regret as the performance measure, defined as the difference between cumulative loss incurred by the online algorithm and that of any feasible…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Peng Zhao , Yu-Jie Zhang , Lijun Zhang , Zhi-Hua Zhou

We study gap-dependent performance guarantees for nearly minimax-optimal algorithms in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation. While prior works have established gap-dependent regret bounds in this setting, existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-25 Haochen Zhang , Zhong Zheng , Lingzhou Xue

We study a new class of MDPs that employs multinomial logit (MNL) function approximation to ensure valid probability distributions over the state space. Despite its significant benefits, incorporating the non-linear function raises…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Long-Fei Li , Yu-Jie Zhang , Peng Zhao , Zhi-Hua Zhou

In this paper, we develop a unified framework for analyzing the tracking error and dynamic regret of inexact online optimization methods under a variety of settings. Specifically, we leverage the quadratic constraint approach from control…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-03 Usman Syed , Emiliano Dall'Anese , Bin Hu

We study linear contextual bandits in the misspecified setting, where the expected reward function can be approximated by a linear function class up to a bounded misspecification level $\zeta>0$. We propose an algorithm based on a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-17 Weitong Zhang , Jiafan He , Zhiyuan Fan , Quanquan Gu

We investigate the hardness of online reinforcement learning in fixed horizon, sparse linear Markov decision process (MDP), with a special focus on the high-dimensional regime where the ambient dimension is larger than the number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-11 Botao Hao , Tor Lattimore , Csaba Szepesvári , Mengdi Wang

Balancing exploration and exploitation is crucial in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we study model-based posterior sampling for reinforcement learning (PSRL) in continuous state-action spaces theoretically and empirically.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-18 Ying Fan , Yifei Ming

We study contextual bandits with budget and time constraints, referred to as constrained contextual bandits.The time and budget constraints significantly complicate the exploration and exploitation tradeoff because they introduce complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-10-20 Huasen Wu , R. Srikant , Xin Liu , Chong Jiang

Due to the drastic gap in complexity between sequential and batch statistical learning, recent work has studied a smoothed sequential learning setting, where Nature is constrained to select contexts with density bounded by 1/{\sigma} with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-05-27 Adam Block , Max Simchowitz

Policy optimization is among the most popular and successful reinforcement learning algorithms, and there is increasing interest in understanding its theoretical guarantees. In this work, we initiate the study of policy optimization for the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Liyu Chen , Haipeng Luo , Aviv Rosenberg

We investigate the \emph{linear contextual bandit problem} with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) contexts. In this problem, we aim to develop a \emph{Best-of-Both-Worlds} (BoBW) algorithm with regret upper bounds in both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Masahiro Kato , Shinji Ito

We study contextual dynamic pricing problems where a firm sells products to $T$ sequentially-arriving consumers, behaving according to an unknown demand model. The firm aims to minimize its regret over a clairvoyant that knows the model in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Zifeng Zhao , Feiyu Jiang , Yi Yu