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The contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a widely used framework for problems requiring sequential decision-making under uncertainty, such as recommendation systems. In applications involving a large number of users, the performance of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Zhiyong Wang , Jiahang Sun , Mingze Kong , Jize Xie , Qinghua Hu , John C. S. Lui , Zhongxiang Dai

The causal bandit problem seeks to identify, through sequential experimentation, an intervention that maximizes the expected reward in a causal system modeled by a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Existing methods typically assume that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yijia Zhao , Qing Zhou

We study the problem of best-arm identification with fixed budget in stochastic multi-armed bandits with Bernoulli rewards. For the problem with two arms, also known as the A/B testing problem, we prove that there is no algorithm that (i)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-05 Po-An Wang , Kaito Ariu , Alexandre Proutiere

When multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms allocate pulls among competing arms, the resulting allocation can exhibit huge variation. This is particularly harmful in modern applications such as learning-enhanced platform operations and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yilun Chen , Jiaqi Lu

Multi-armed bandits are one of the theoretical pillars of reinforcement learning. Recently, the investigation of quantum algorithms for multi-armed bandit problems was started, and it was found that a quadratic speed-up (in query…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-03-26 Simon Buchholz , Jonas M. Kübler , Bernhard Schölkopf

We consider a sequential multi-task problem, where each task is modeled as the stochastic multi-armed bandit with K arms. We assume the bandit tasks are adjacently similar in the sense that the difference between the mean rewards of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-14 NR Rahul , Vaibhav Katewa

We study the non-contextual multi-armed bandit problem in a transfer learning setting: before any pulls, the learner is given N'_k i.i.d. samples from each source distribution nu'_k, and the true target distributions nu_k lie within a known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Adrien Prevost , Timothee Mathieu , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard

We present a formal model of human decision-making in explore-exploit tasks using the context of multi-armed bandit problems, where the decision-maker must choose among multiple options with uncertain rewards. We address the standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-23 Paul Reverdy , Vaibhav Srivastava , Naomi E. Leonard

In this paper, we consider a risk-averse multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem where the goal is to learn a policy that minimizes the risk of low expected return, as opposed to maximizing the expected return itself, which is the objective in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-12 Yi Shen , Jessilyn Dunn , Michael M. Zavlanos

This paper studies an instance of the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, specifically where several causal MABs operate chronologically in the same dynamical system. Practically the reward distribution of each bandit is governed by the same…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-12-06 Neil Dhir

In many real-world applications, multiple agents seek to learn how to perform highly related yet slightly different tasks in an online bandit learning protocol. We formulate this problem as the $\epsilon$-multi-player multi-armed bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-21 Zhi Wang , Chicheng Zhang , Manish Kumar Singh , Laurel D. Riek , Kamalika Chaudhuri

The purpose of this paper is to provide further understanding into the structure of the sequential allocation ("stochastic multi-armed bandit", or MAB) problem by establishing probability one finite horizon bounds and convergence rates for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-12-18 Wesley Cowan , Michael N. Katehakis

It is well known that in stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB), the sample mean of an arm is typically not an unbiased estimator of its true mean. In this paper, we decouple three different sources of this selection bias: adaptive…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-10-29 Jaehyeok Shin , Aaditya Ramdas , Alessandro Rinaldo

We study the infinite-horizon restless bandit problem with the average reward criterion, in both discrete-time and continuous-time settings. A fundamental goal is to efficiently compute policies that achieve a diminishing optimality gap as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Yige Hong , Qiaomin Xie , Yudong Chen , Weina Wang

We formulate the problem of sampling and recovering clustered graph signal as a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem. This formulation lends naturally to learning sampling strategies using the well-known gradient MAB algorithm. In particular,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-16 Oleksii Abramenko , Alexander Jung

In many platforms, user arrivals exhibit a self-reinforcing behavior: future user arrivals are likely to have preferences similar to users who were satisfied in the past. In other words, arrivals exhibit positive externalities. We study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-08 Virag Shah , Jose Blanchet , Ramesh Johari

We consider a continuous-time multi-arm bandit problem (CTMAB), where the learner can sample arms any number of times in a given interval and obtain a random reward from each sample, however, increasing the frequency of sampling incurs an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Rahul Vaze , Manjesh K. Hanawal

In recent years, multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework has attracted a lot of attention in various applications, from recommender systems and information retrieval to healthcare and finance, due to its stellar performance combined with certain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-24 Djallel Bouneffouf , Irina Rish

We study a distributed stochastic multi-armed bandit where a client supplies the learner with communication-constrained feedback based on the rewards for the corresponding arm pulls. In our setup, the client must encode the rewards such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Prathamesh Mayekar , Jonathan Scarlett , Vincent Y. F. Tan

Restless Multi-Armed Bandits (RMABs) are a powerful framework for sequential decision-making, widely applied in resource allocation and intervention optimization challenges in public health. However, traditional RMABs assume independence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Hanmo Zhang , Zenghui Sun , Kai Wang