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We study the linear contextual bandit problem in the presence of adversarial corruption, where the reward at each round is corrupted by an adversary, and the corruption level (i.e., the sum of corruption magnitudes over the horizon) is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Tong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

Clustering with bandit feedback refers to the problem of partitioning a set of items, where the clustering algorithm can sequentially query the items to receive noisy observations. The problem is formally posed as the task of partitioning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-13 Victor Thuot , Sebastian Vogt , Debarghya Ghoshdastidar , Nicolas Verzelen

We consider a class of restless bandit problems that finds a broad application area in reinforcement learning and stochastic optimization. We consider $N$ independent discrete-time Markov processes, each of which had two possible states: 1…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-14 Keqin Liu , Richard Weber , Chengzhong Zhang

In this work, we investigate the problem of adapting to the presence or absence of causal structure in multi-armed bandit problems. In addition to the usual reward signal, we assume the learner has access to additional variables, observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Ziyi Liu , Idan Attias , Daniel M. Roy

Motivated by a range of applications, we study in this paper the problem of transfer learning for nonparametric contextual multi-armed bandits under the covariate shift model, where we have data collected on source bandits before the start…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-01-26 Changxiao Cai , T. Tony Cai , Hongzhe Li

Existing risk-aware multi-armed bandit models typically focus on risk measures of individual options such as variance. As a result, they cannot be directly applied to important real-world online decision making problems with correlated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-12 Yihan Du , Siwei Wang , Zhixuan Fang , Longbo Huang

Combinatorial bandits with semi-bandit feedback generalize multi-armed bandits, where the agent chooses sets of arms and observes a noisy reward for each arm contained in the chosen set. The action set satisfies a given structure such as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-22 Marc Jourdan , Mojmír Mutný , Johannes Kirschner , Andreas Krause

This paper addresses an important class of restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problems that finds broad application in operations research, stochastic optimization, and reinforcement learning. There are $N$ independent Markov processes that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-18 Keqin Liu

Mode estimation is a classical problem in statistics with a wide range of applications in machine learning. Despite this, there is little understanding in its robustness properties under possibly adversarial data contamination. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-09 Aldo Pacchiano , Heinrich Jiang , Michael I. Jordan

A major research direction in contextual bandits is to develop algorithms that are computationally efficient, yet support flexible, general-purpose function approximation. Algorithms based on modeling rewards have shown strong empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-14 Dylan J. Foster , Claudio Gentile , Mehryar Mohri , Julian Zimmert

Ridgeless regression has garnered attention among researchers, particularly in light of the ``Benign Overfitting'' phenomenon, where models interpolating noisy samples demonstrate robust generalization. However, kernel ridgeless regression…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Fan He , Mingzhen He , Lei Shi , Xiaolin Huang , Johan A. K. Suykens

We study a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, where at each time step, the player observes an independently sampled context that determines the arms' mean rewards. However, playing an arm blocks it (across all contexts) for a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Soumya Basu , Orestis Papadigenopoulos , Constantine Caramanis , Sanjay Shakkottai

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 consider the bandit problem of selecting $K$ out of $N$ arms at each time step. The reward can be a non-linear function of the rewards of the selected individual arms. The direct use of a multi-armed bandit algorithm requires choosing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal , Christopher J. Quinn , Abhishek Umrawal

Restless multi-armed bandits (RMABs) extend multi-armed bandits to allow for stateful arms, where the state of each arm evolves restlessly with different transitions depending on whether that arm is pulled. Solving RMABs requires…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Kai Wang , Lily Xu , Aparna Taneja , Milind Tambe

We tackle the communication efficiency challenge of learning kernelized contextual bandits in a distributed setting. Despite the recent advances in communication-efficient distributed bandit learning, existing solutions are restricted to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Chuanhao Li , Huazheng Wang , Mengdi Wang , Hongning Wang

We consider the contextual bandit problem on general action and context spaces, where the learner's rewards depend on their selected actions and an observable context. This generalizes the standard multi-armed bandit to the case where side…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-03 Moise Blanchard , Steve Hanneke , Patrick Jaillet

This paper studies model-based bandit and reinforcement learning (RL) with nonlinear function approximations. We propose to study convergence to approximate local maxima because we show that global convergence is statistically intractable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-04 Kefan Dong , Jiaqi Yang , Tengyu Ma

Motivated by the challenges of edge inference, we study a variant of the cascade bandit model in which each arm corresponds to an inference model with an associated accuracy and error probability. We analyse four decision-making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-30 R Sri Prakash , Nikhil Karamchandani , Sharayu Moharir

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