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We study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem when one knows the value $\mu^{(\star)}$ of an optimal arm, as a well as a positive lower bound on the smallest positive gap $\Delta$. We propose a new randomized policy that attains a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-02-13 Sébastien Bubeck , Vianney Perchet , Philippe Rigollet

Stochastic linear bandits with high-dimensional sparse features are a practical model for a variety of domains, including personalized medicine and online advertising. We derive a novel $\Omega(n^{2/3})$ dimension-free minimax regret lower…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-09-07 Botao Hao , Tor Lattimore , Mengdi Wang

We consider a collaborative online learning paradigm, wherein a group of agents connected through a social network are engaged in playing a stochastic multi-armed bandit game. Each time an agent takes an action, the corresponding reward is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-07-12 Ravi Kumar Kolla , Krishna Jagannathan , Aditya Gopalan

The stochastic multi-armed bandit problem is well understood when the reward distributions are sub-Gaussian. In this paper we examine the bandit problem under the weaker assumption that the distributions have moments of order 1+\epsilon,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2012-09-11 Sébastien Bubeck , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Gábor Lugosi

We consider a special case of bandit problems, named batched bandits, in which an agent observes batches of responses over a certain time period. Unlike previous work, we consider a more practically relevant batch-centric scenario of batch…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Danil Provodin , Pratik Gajane , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Maurits Kaptein

The stochastic multi-armed bandit problem is a well-known model for studying the exploration-exploitation trade-off. It has significant possible applications in adaptive clinical trials, which allow for dynamic changes in the treatment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Hossein Aboutalebi , Doina Precup , Tibor Schuster

We consider the stochastic bandit problem in the sublinear space setting, where one cannot record the win-loss record for all $K$ arms. We give an algorithm using $O(1)$ words of space with regret \[ \sum_{i=1}^{K}\frac{1}{\Delta_i}\log…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-05-17 David Liau , Eric Price , Zhao Song , Ger Yang

We consider contextual bandit learning under distribution shift when reward vectors are ordered according to a given preference cone. We propose an adaptive-discretization and optimistic elimination based policy that self-tunes to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Apurv Shukla , P. R. Kumar

We present a new strategy for gap estimation in randomized algorithms for multiarmed bandits and combine it with the EXP3++ algorithm of Seldin and Slivkins (2014). In the stochastic regime the strategy reduces dependence of regret on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-10 Yevgeny Seldin , Gábor Lugosi

We study a constrained contextual linear bandit setting, where the goal of the agent is to produce a sequence of policies, whose expected cumulative reward over the course of $T$ rounds is maximum, and each has an expected cost below a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-20 Aldo Pacchiano , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Peter Bartlett , Heinrich Jiang

We study the optimal trade-off between expectation and tail risk for regret distribution in the stochastic multi-armed bandit model. We fully characterize the interplay among three desired properties for policy design: worst-case…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-27 David Simchi-Levi , Zeyu Zheng , Feng Zhu

We study the $K$-armed dueling bandit problem, a variation of the standard stochastic bandit problem where the feedback is limited to relative comparisons of a pair of arms. We introduce a tight asymptotic regret lower bound that is based…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-30 Junpei Komiyama , Junya Honda , Hisashi Kashima , Hiroshi Nakagawa

We study the problem of stochastic contextual bandits in the agnostic setting, where the goal is to compete with the best policy in a given class without assuming realizability or imposing model restrictions on losses or rewards. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-06 Samuel Girard , Aurelien Bibaut , Arthur Gretton , Nathan Kallus , Houssam Zenati

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 consider a stochastic bandit problem with a possibly infinite number of arms. We write $p^*$ for the proportion of optimal arms and $\Delta$ for the minimal mean-gap between optimal and sub-optimal arms. We characterize the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-08 Rianne de Heide , James Cheshire , Pierre Ménard , Alexandra Carpentier

This study considers the partial monitoring problem with $k$-actions and $d$-outcomes and provides the first best-of-both-worlds algorithms, whose regrets are favorably bounded both in the stochastic and adversarial regimes. In particular,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Taira Tsuchiya , Shinji Ito , Junya Honda

We consider the problem where M agents collaboratively interact with an instance of a stochastic K-armed contextual bandit, where K>>M. The goal of the agents is to simultaneously minimize the cumulative regret over all the agents over a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-16 Jiabin Lin , Shana Moothedath

We present an efficient algorithm for linear contextual bandits with adversarial losses and stochastic action sets. Our approach reduces this setting to misspecification-robust adversarial linear bandits with fixed action sets. Without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Tim van Erven , Jack Mayo , Julia Olkhovskaya , Chen-Yu Wei

This paper studies the one-shot behavior of no-regret algorithms for stochastic bandits. Although many algorithms are known to be asymptotically optimal with respect to the expected regret, over a single run, their pseudo-regret seems to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Victor Boone

Motivated by practical applications, chiefly clinical trials, we study the regret achievable for stochastic bandits under the constraint that the employed policy must split trials into a small number of batches. We propose a simple policy,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-03-30 Vianney Perchet , Philippe Rigollet , Sylvain Chassang , Erik Snowberg