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We consider the sequential optimization of an unknown, continuous, and expensive to evaluate reward function, from noisy and adversarially corrupted observed rewards. When the corruption attacks are subject to a suitable budget $C$ and the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-30 Ilija Bogunovic , Zihan Li , Andreas Krause , Jonathan Scarlett

We consider the problem of contextual bandits and imitation learning, where the learner lacks direct knowledge of the executed action's reward. Instead, the learner can actively query an expert at each round to compare two actions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan , Wen Sun , Runzhe Wu

We study how to adapt to smoothly-varying ('easy') environments in well-known online learning problems where acquiring information is expensive. For the problem of label efficient prediction, which is a budgeted version of prediction with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-09 Siddharth Mitra , Aditya Gopalan

We use surrogate losses to obtain several new regret bounds and new algorithms for contextual bandit learning. Using the ramp loss, we derive new margin-based regret bounds in terms of standard sequential complexity measures of a benchmark…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-06 Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy

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 study bi-criteria combinatorial optimization under noisy function evaluations. While resilience and black-box offline-to-online reductions have been studied in single-objective settings, extending these ideas to bi-criteria problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Vaneet Aggarwal , Shweta Jain , Subham Pokhriyal , Christopher John Quinn

This paper investigates the problem of controlling a linear system under possibly unbounded stochastic noise with unknown convex cost functions, known as an online control problem. In contrast to the existing work, which assumes the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-03 Kaito Ito , Taira Tsuchiya

We study the linear bandit problem that accounts for partially observable features. Without proper handling, unobserved features can lead to linear regret in the decision horizon $T$, as their influence on rewards is unknown. To tackle this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-19 Wonyoung Kim , Sungwoo Park , Garud Iyengar , Assaf Zeevi , Min-hwan Oh

In this paper, we consider algorithm-independent lower bounds for the problem of black-box optimization of functions having a bounded norm is some Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS), which can be viewed as a non-Bayesian Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-25 Xu Cai , Jonathan Scarlett

Variance-dependent regret bounds for linear contextual bandits, which improve upon the classical $\tilde{O}(d\sqrt{K})$ regret bound to $\tilde{O}(d\sqrt{\sum_{k=1}^K\sigma_k^2})$, where $d$ is the context dimension, $K$ is the number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

In Online Convex Optimization (OCO), when the stochastic gradient has a finite variance, many algorithms provably work and guarantee a sublinear regret. However, limited results are known if the gradient estimate has a heavy tail, i.e., the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Zijian Liu

We consider the neural contextual bandit problem. In contrast to the existing work which primarily focuses on ReLU neural nets, we consider a general set of smooth activation functions. Under this more general setting, (i) we derive…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-02 Sudeep Salgia , Sattar Vakili , Qing Zhao

Recent work shows that when contexts are drawn i.i.d., linear contextual bandits can be reduced to single-context linear bandits. This ``contexts are cheap" perspective is highly advantageous, as it allows for sharper finite-time analyses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Kaan Buyukkalayci , Osama Hanna , Christina Fragouli

Many works have developed no-regret algorithms for contextual bandits with function approximation, where the mean reward function over context-action pairs belongs to a function class. Although there are many approaches to this problem, one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Aldo Pacchiano

We consider the problem of optimizing an unknown (typically non-convex) function with a bounded norm in some Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS), based on noisy bandit feedback. We consider a novel variant of this problem in which the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-05 Ilija Bogunovic , Andreas Krause , Jonathan Scarlett

We propose a linear contextual bandit algorithm with $O(\sqrt{dT\log T})$ regret bound, where $d$ is the dimension of contexts and $T$ isthe time horizon. Our proposed algorithm is equipped with a novel estimator in which exploration is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-03-30 Wonyoung Kim , Myunghee Cho Paik , Min-hwan Oh

We consider the problem of stochastic $K$-armed dueling bandit in the contextual setting, where at each round the learner is presented with a context set of $K$ items, each represented by a $d$-dimensional feature vector, and the goal of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Aadirupa Saha , Aditya Gopalan

In this paper, we consider the problem of black-box optimization with noisy feedback revealed in batches, where the unknown function to optimize has a bounded norm in some Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). We refer to this as the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-16 Chenkai Ma , Keqin Chen , Jonathan Scarlett

In this paper, we consider the problem of prediction with expert advice in dynamic environments. We choose tracking regret as the performance metric and develop two adaptive and efficient algorithms with data-dependent tracking regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-11 Shiyin Lu , Lijun Zhang

Leveraging offline data is an attractive way to accelerate online sequential decision-making. However, it is crucial to account for latent states in users or environments in the offline data, and latent bandits form a compelling model for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Chinmaya Kausik , Kevin Tan , Ambuj Tewari