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Related papers: Thompson sampling: Precise arm-pull dynamics and a…

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Reinforcement learning (RL) has become an effective way to improve prompt alignment and perceptual quality in diffusion and flow-matching generators. A critical step for applying online RL to flow matching is turning the deterministic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Jade Zou , Tao Huang , Weijie Kong , Junzhe Li , Yue Wu , Qi Tian , Jiangfeng Xiong , Jianwei Zhang , Liefeng Bo , Zhao Zhong

This work considers the problem of selective-sampling for best-arm identification. Given a set of potential options $\mathcal{Z}\subset\mathbb{R}^d$, a learner aims to compute with probability greater than $1-\delta$, $\arg\max_{z\in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Romain Camilleri , Zhihan Xiong , Maryam Fazel , Lalit Jain , Kevin Jamieson

We study the regret of Thompson sampling (TS) algorithms for exponential family bandits, where the reward distribution is from a one-dimensional exponential family, which covers many common reward distributions including Bernoulli,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-09 Tianyuan Jin , Pan Xu , Xiaokui Xiao , Anima Anandkumar

The bias of the sample means of the arms in multi-armed bandits is an important issue in adaptive data analysis that has recently received considerable attention in the literature. Existing results relate in precise ways the sign and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-02-24 Jaehyeok Shin , Aaditya Ramdas , Alessandro Rinaldo

Thompson sampling has impressive empirical performance for many multi-armed bandit problems. But current algorithms for Thompson sampling only work for the case of conjugate priors since these algorithms require to infer the posterior,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-17 Yichi Zhou , Jun Zhu , Jingwei Zhuo

This paper focuses on selecting the arm with the highest variance from a set of $K$ independent arms. Specifically, we focus on two settings: (i) misallocation minimization setting, that penalizes the number of pulls of suboptimal arms in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Sabrina Khurshid , Gourab Ghatak , Mohammad Shahid Abdulla

Thompson Sampling is one of the oldest heuristics for multi-armed bandit problems. It is a randomized algorithm based on Bayesian ideas, and has recently generated significant interest after several studies demonstrated it to have better…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-09-18 Shipra Agrawal , Navin Goyal

We present a stochastic constrained output-feedback data-driven predictive control scheme for linear time-invariant systems subject to bounded additive disturbances. The approach uses data-driven predictors based on an extension of Willems'…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-07 Johannes Teutsch , Sebastian Kerz , Dirk Wollherr , Marion Leibold

Online platforms routinely compare multi-armed bandit algorithms, such as UCB and Thompson Sampling, to select the best-performing policy. Unlike standard A/B tests for static treatments, each run of a bandit algorithm over $T$ users…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Huiling Meng , Ningyuan Chen , Xuefeng Gao

This paper studies active learning in the context of robust statistics. Specifically, we propose a variant of the Best Arm Identification problem for \emph{contaminated bandits}, where each arm pull has probability $\varepsilon$ of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-11-16 Jason Altschuler , Victor-Emmanuel Brunel , Alan Malek

We study the problem of identifying the best arm in a stochastic multi-armed bandit game. Given a set of $n$ arms indexed from $1$ to $n$, each arm $i$ is associated with an unknown reward distribution supported on $[0,1]$ with mean…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Pinyan Lu , Chao Tao , Xiaojin Zhang

Reachability analysis is at the core of many applications, from neural network verification, to safe trajectory planning of uncertain systems. However, this problem is notoriously challenging, and current approaches tend to be either too…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-11-10 Thomas Lew , Marco Pavone

We present a method for providing statistical guarantees on runtime safety and goal reachability for integrated planning and control of a class of systems with unknown nonlinear stochastic underactuated dynamics. Specifically, given a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Craig Knuth , Glen Chou , Jamie Reese , Joe Moore

In good arm identification (GAI), the goal is to identify one arm whose average performance exceeds a given threshold, referred to as a good arm, if it exists. Few works have studied GAI in the fixed-budget setting when the sampling budget…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-08 Marc Jourdan , Andrée Delahaye-Duriez , Clémence Réda

In the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, a randomized probability matching policy called Thompson sampling (TS) has shown excellent performance in various reward models. In addition to the empirical performance, TS has been shown to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Jongyeong Lee , Junya Honda , Chao-Kai Chiang , Masashi Sugiyama

Stochastic optimal control with unknown randomness distributions has been studied for a long time, encompassing robust control, distributionally robust control, and adaptive control. We propose a new episodic Bayesian approach that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-02 Alexander Shapiro , Enlu Zhou , Yifan Lin , Yuhao Wang

Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithms are a widely-used class of sequential algorithms for the $K$-armed bandit problem. Despite extensive research over the past decades aimed at understanding their asymptotic and (near) minimax…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-12-10 Qiyang Han , Koulik Khamaru , Cun-Hui Zhang

Controllers for autonomous systems that operate in safety-critical settings must account for stochastic disturbances. Such disturbances are often modelled as process noise, and common assumptions are that the underlying distributions are…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-12-08 Thom S. Badings , Alessandro Abate , Nils Jansen , David Parker , Hasan A. Poonawala , Marielle Stoelinga

The restless bandit problem is one of the most well-studied generalizations of the celebrated stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory. In its ultimate generality, the restless bandit problem is known to be PSPACE-Hard to…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2009-02-03 Sudipto Guha , Kamesh Munagala , Peng Shi

We introduce Time-Conditioned Contraction Matching (TCCM), a novel method for semi-supervised anomaly detection in tabular data. TCCM is inspired by flow matching, a recent generative modeling framework that learns velocity fields between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Zhong Li , Qi Huang , Yuxuan Zhu , Lincen Yang , Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri , Niki van Stein , Matthijs van Leeuwen