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Although many algorithms for the multi-armed bandit problem are well-understood theoretically, empirical confirmation of their effectiveness is generally scarce. This paper presents a thorough empirical study of the most popular multi-armed…

Multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms are efficient approaches to reduce the opportunity cost of online experimentation and are used by companies to find the best product from periodically refreshed product catalogs. However, these algorithms…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback relies on reward models to align large language models with human preferences. However, RLHF often suffers from reward hacking, wherein policy learning exploits flaws in the trained reward model to…

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…

Time-constrained decision processes have been ubiquitous in many fundamental applications in physics, biology and computer science. Recently, restart strategies have gained significant attention for boosting the efficiency of…

People frequently face challenging decision-making problems in which outcomes are uncertain or unknown. Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms exist that can outperform humans at learning such tasks. Thus, there is an opportunity for AI…

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…

When making decisions under uncertainty, individuals often deviate from rational behavior, which can be evaluated across three dimensions: risk preference, probability weighting, and loss aversion. Given the widespread use of large language…

We study exploration in stochastic multi-armed bandits when we have access to a divisible resource that can be allocated in varying amounts to arm pulls. We focus in particular on the allocation of distributed computing resources, where we…

We study the Logistic Contextual Slate Bandit problem, where, at each round, an agent selects a slate of $N$ items from an exponentially large set (of size $2^{\Omega(N)}$) of candidate slates provided by the environment. A single binary…

We consider a multi-armed bandit setting where, at the beginning of each round, the learner receives noisy independent, and possibly biased, \emph{evaluations} of the true reward of each arm and it selects $K$ arms with the objective of…

Although Multi Armed Bandit (MAB) on one hand and the policy gradient approach on the other hand are among the most used frameworks of Reinforcement Learning, the theoretical properties of the policy gradient algorithm used for MAB have not…

Ambition and risk-taking have been heralded as important ways for marginalized communities to get out of cycles of poverty. As a result, educational messaging often encourages individuals to strengthen their personal resolve and develop…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to achieve impressive results for many reasoning-based NLP tasks, suggesting a degree of deductive reasoning capability. However, it remains unclear to which extent LLMs, in both informal and…

Selecting the best large language model (LLM) for a fixed benchmark is often expensive, since exhaustive evaluation requires running every model on every example. Multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms can reduce the number of LLM calls by…

The multi-armed bandit problem is a classical decision-making problem where an agent has to learn an optimal action balancing exploration and exploitation. Properly managing this trade-off requires a correct assessment of uncertainty; in…

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit highly agreeable and reinforcing conversational styles, also known as AI-sycophancy. Although this pattern arises from training objectives that reward user satisfaction over accuracy, it may become…

We study decision making in environments where the reward is only partially observed, but can be modeled as a function of an action and an observed context. This setting, known as contextual bandits, encompasses a wide variety of…

We consider the problem of best arm identification in a variant of multi-armed bandits called linked bandits. In a single interaction with linked bandits, multiple arms are played sequentially until one of them receives a positive reward.…

Motivated by economic applications such as recommender systems, we study the behavior of stochastic bandits algorithms under \emph{strategic behavior} conducted by rational actors, i.e., the arms. Each arm is a \emph{self-interested}…