English
Related papers

Related papers: Probe-then-Commit Multi-Objective Bandits: Theoret…

200 papers

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

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

The stochastic contextual bandit problem, which models the trade-off between exploration and exploitation, has many real applications, including recommender systems, online advertising and clinical trials. As many other machine learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-14 Qin Ding , Yue Kang , Yi-Wei Liu , Thomas C. M. Lee , Cho-Jui Hsieh , James Sharpnack

Bandits with feedback graphs are powerful online learning models that interpolate between the full information and classic bandit problems, capturing many real-life applications. A recent work by Zhang et al. (2023) studies the contextual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-14 Mengxiao Zhang , Yuheng Zhang , Haipeng Luo , Paul Mineiro

Motivated by emerging applications such as live-streaming e-commerce, promotions and recommendations, we introduce and solve a general class of non-stationary multi-armed bandit problems that have the following two features: (i) the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-12-23 David Simchi-Levi , Zeyu Zheng , Feng Zhu

The study of collaborative multi-agent bandits has attracted significant attention recently. In light of this, we initiate the study of a new collaborative setting, consisting of $N$ agents such that each agent is learning one of $M$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Ronshee Chawla , Daniel Vial , Sanjay Shakkottai , R. Srikant

A Tree Markov Decision Problem (T-MDP) is a finite-horizon MDP with a starting state $s_{1}$, in which every state is reachable from $s_{1}$ through exactly one state-action trajectory. T-MDPs arise naturally as abstractions of decision…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Anvay Shah , Ramsundar Anandanarayanan , Sharayu Moharir , Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan

We study a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, where at each time step, the player observes an independently sampled context that determines the arms' mean rewards. However, playing an arm blocks it (across all contexts) for a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Soumya Basu , Orestis Papadigenopoulos , Constantine Caramanis , Sanjay Shakkottai

This paper studies the adversarial graphical contextual bandits, a variant of adversarial multi-armed bandits that leverage two categories of the most common side information: \emph{contexts} and \emph{side observations}. In this setting, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-18 Lingda Wang , Bingcong Li , Huozhi Zhou , Georgios B. Giannakis , Lav R. Varshney , Zhizhen Zhao

The multi-armed bandit problem is a core framework for sequential decision-making under uncertainty, but classical algorithms often fail in environments with hidden, time-varying states that confound reward estimation and optimal action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Jikai Jin , Kenneth Hung , Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Baoyi Shi , Congshan Zhang

We study the problem of federated stochastic multi-arm contextual bandits with unknown contexts, in which M agents are faced with different bandits and collaborate to learn. The communication model consists of a central server and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Jiabin Lin , Shana Moothedath

We consider the problem of learning in episodic finite-horizon Markov decision processes with an unknown transition function, bandit feedback, and adversarial losses. We propose an efficient algorithm that achieves…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-03 Chi Jin , Tiancheng Jin , Haipeng Luo , Suvrit Sra , Tiancheng Yu

Stochastic linear bandits are a natural and well-studied model for structured exploration/exploitation problems and are widely used in applications such as online marketing and recommendation. One of the main challenges faced by…

A contextual bandit problem is studied in a highly non-stationary environment, which is ubiquitous in various recommender systems due to the time-varying interests of users. Two models with disjoint and hybrid payoffs are considered to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Xiao Xu , Fang Dong , Yanghua Li , Shaojian He , Xin Li

In this work, we investigate the problem of adapting to the presence or absence of causal structure in multi-armed bandit problems. In addition to the usual reward signal, we assume the learner has access to additional variables, observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Ziyi Liu , Idan Attias , Daniel M. Roy

We investigate the problem of stochastic, combinatorial multi-armed bandits where the learner only has access to bandit feedback and the reward function can be non-linear. We provide a general framework for adapting discrete offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Guanyu Nie , Yididiya Y Nadew , Yanhui Zhu , Vaneet Aggarwal , Christopher John Quinn

Modern systems, such as digital platforms and service systems, increasingly rely on contextual bandits for online decision-making; however, their deployment can inadvertently create unfair exposure among arms, undermining long-term platform…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-05 Qingwen Zhang , Wenjia Wang

Motivated by wireless networks where interference or channel state estimates provide partial insight into throughput, we study a variant of the classical stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in which the learner has limited access to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Arun Verma , Manjesh Kumar Hanawal , Arun Rajkumar

A core element in decision-making under uncertainty is the feedback on the quality of the performed actions. However, in many applications, such feedback is restricted. For example, in recommendation systems, repeatedly asking the user to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Yonathan Efroni , Nadav Merlis , Aadirupa Saha , Shie Mannor

Conducting randomized experiments in education settings raises the question of how we can use machine learning techniques to improve educational interventions. Using Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) algorithms like Thompson Sampling (TS) in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-11 Fernando J. Yanez , Angela Zavaleta-Bernuy , Ziwen Han , Michael Liut , Anna Rafferty , Joseph Jay Williams