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Motivated by the fact that humans like some level of unpredictability or novelty, and might therefore get quickly bored when interacting with a stationary policy, we introduce a novel non-stationary bandit problem, where the expected reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Pierre Laforgue , Giulia Clerici , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Ran Gilad-Bachrach

We study contextual bandits in the presence of a stage-wise constraint when the constraint must be satisfied both with high probability and in expectation. We start with the linear case where both the reward function and the stage-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Aldo Pacchiano , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Peter Bartlett

In this paper we propose a novel experimental design-based algorithm to minimize regret in online stochastic linear and combinatorial bandits. While existing literature tends to focus on optimism-based algorithms--which have been shown to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Andrew Wagenmaker , Julian Katz-Samuels , Kevin Jamieson

Regret in stochastic multi-armed bandits traditionally measures the difference between the highest reward and either the arithmetic mean of accumulated rewards or the final reward. These conventional metrics often fail to address fairness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Dhruv Sarkar , Nishant Pandey , Sayak Ray Chowdhury

Information-directed sampling (IDS) is a powerful framework for solving bandit problems which has shown strong results in both Bayesian and frequentist settings. However, frequentist IDS, like many other bandit algorithms, requires that one…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-10 Piotr M. Suder , Eric Laber

We study collaborative learning in multi-agent Bayesian bandit problems, where strategic agents collectively solve the same bandit instance. While multiple agents can accelerate learning by sharing information, strategic agents might prefer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Idan Barnea , Ofir Schlisselberg , Yishay Mansour

Recommender systems trained in a continuous learning fashion are plagued by the feedback loop problem, also known as algorithmic bias. This causes a newly trained model to act greedily and favor items that have already been engaged by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Dalin Guo , Sofia Ira Ktena , Ferenc Huszar , Pranay Kumar Myana , Wenzhe Shi , Alykhan Tejani

We study risk-sensitive multi-agent reinforcement learning under general-sum Markov games, where agents optimize the entropic risk measure of rewards with possibly diverse risk preferences. We show that using the regret naively adapted from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Yingjie Fei , Ruitu Xu

Linear bandits have a wide variety of applications including recommendation systems yet they make one strong assumption: the algorithms must know an upper bound $S$ on the norm of the unknown parameter $\theta^*$ that governs the reward…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-05-04 Spencer , Gales , Sunder Sethuraman , Kwang-Sung Jun

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

We study nonparametric contextual bandits under batch constraints, where the expected reward for each action is modeled as a smooth function of covariates, and the policy updates are made at the end of each batch of observations. We…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-06 Rong Jiang , Cong Ma

We consider regret minimization in a general collaborative multi-agent multi-armed bandit model, in which each agent faces a finite set of arms and may communicate with other agents through a central controller. The optimal arm for each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Amitis Shidani , Sattar Vakili

Increasingly, recommender systems are tasked with improving users' long-term satisfaction. In this context, we study a content exploration task, which we formalize as a bandit problem with delayed rewards. There is an apparent trade-off in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Kelly W. Zhang , Thomas Baldwin-McDonald , Kamil Ciosek , Lucas Maystre , Daniel Russo

Bandit optimization is a difficult problem, especially if the reward model is high-dimensional. When rewards are modeled by neural networks, sublinear regret has only been shown under strong assumptions, usually when the network is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Mikhail Terekhov

Computationally efficient contextual bandits are often based on estimating a predictive model of rewards given contexts and arms using past data. However, when the reward model is not well-specified, the bandit algorithm may incur…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-14 Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Vitor Hadad , Susan Athey

We initiate the study of multi-stage episodic reinforcement learning under adversarial corruptions in both the rewards and the transition probabilities of the underlying system extending recent results for the special case of stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Thodoris Lykouris , Max Simchowitz , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Wen Sun

Designing efficient general-purpose contextual bandit algorithms that work with large -- or even continuous -- action spaces would facilitate application to important scenarios such as information retrieval, recommendation systems, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Yinglun Zhu , Paul Mineiro

We study adaptive regret bounds in terms of the variation of the losses (the so-called path-length bounds) for both multi-armed bandit and more generally linear bandit. We first show that the seemingly suboptimal path-length bound of (Wei…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-19 Sébastien Bubeck , Yuanzhi Li , Haipeng Luo , Chen-Yu Wei

We consider model selection for sequential decision making in stochastic environments with bandit feedback, where a meta-learner has at its disposal a pool of base learners, and decides on the fly which action to take based on the policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Aldo Pacchiano , Christoph Dann , Claudio Gentile

We study a stochastic bandit algorithm motivated by retry-aware objectives that value the best outcome among multiple attempts, such as pass@$k$ and max@$k$. Given a posterior over arm values, ReMax chooses a sampling distribution that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Bingkui Tong , Junpei Komiyama , Soichiro Nishimori , Paavo Parmas