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The paper proposes a novel upper confidence bound (UCB) procedure for identifying the arm with the largest mean in a multi-armed bandit game in the fixed confidence setting using a small number of total samples. The procedure cannot be…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-12-30 Kevin Jamieson , Matthew Malloy , Robert Nowak , Sébastien Bubeck

This paper focuses on best-arm identification in multi-armed bandits with bounded rewards. We develop an algorithm that is a fusion of lil-UCB and KL-LUCB, offering the best qualities of the two algorithms in one method. This is achieved by…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-09-13 Bob Mankoff , Robert Nowak , Ervin Tanczos

The reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) can be substantially improved by training them with reinforcement learning (RL). The RL objective for LLM training involves a regularization term, which is the reverse…

We study the $K$-Max combinatorial multi-armed bandits problem with continuous outcome distributions and weak value-index feedback: each base arm has an unknown continuous outcome distribution, and in each round the learning agent selects…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Yu Chen , Siwei Wang , Longbo Huang , Wei Chen

We introduce a novel framework called combinatorial logistic bandits (CLogB), where in each round, a subset of base arms (called the super arm) is selected, with the outcome of each base arm being binary and its expectation following a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Xutong Liu , Xiangxiang Dai , Xuchuang Wang , Mohammad Hajiesmaili , John C. S. Lui

In the regret-based formulation of Multi-armed Bandit (MAB) problems, except in rare instances, much of the literature focuses on arms with i.i.d. rewards. In this paper, we consider the problem of obtaining regret guarantees for MAB…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Arghyadip Roy , Sanjay Shakkottai , R. Srikant

The Indexed Minimum Empirical Divergence (IMED) algorithm is a highly effective approach that offers a stronger theoretical guarantee of the asymptotic optimality compared to the Kullback--Leibler Upper Confidence Bound (KL-UCB) algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Jie Bian , Vincent Y. F. Tan

The PhD thesis of Maillard (2013) presents a rather obscure algorithm for the $K$-armed bandit problem. This less-known algorithm, which we call Maillard sampling (MS), computes the probability of choosing each arm in a \textit{closed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-08 Jie Bian , Kwang-Sung Jun

What can an agent learn in a stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem from a dataset that contains just a single sample for each arm? Surprisingly, in this work, we demonstrate that even in such a data-starved setting it may still be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Ruiqi Zhang , Yuexiang Zhai , Andrea Zanette

We investigate the sample complexity of learning the optimal arm for multi-task bandit problems. Arms consist of two components: one that is shared across tasks (that we call representation) and one that is task-specific (that we call…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-29 Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

Multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a class of online learning problems where a learning agent aims to maximize its expected cumulative reward while repeatedly selecting to pull arms with unknown reward distributions. We consider a scenario where…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-25 Yang Cao , Zheng Wen , Branislav Kveton , Yao Xie

This paper is concerned with offline reinforcement learning (RL), which learns using pre-collected data without further exploration. Effective offline RL would be able to accommodate distribution shift and limited data coverage. However,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-11 Gen Li , Laixi Shi , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi , Yuting Wei

Ensemble learning plays a crucial role in practical applications of online learning due to its enhanced classification performance and adaptable adjustment mechanisms. However, most weight allocation strategies in ensemble learning are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Songqiao Hu , Zeyi Liu , Xiao He

Differential Privacy (DP) provides a rigorous framework for privacy, ensuring the outputs of data-driven algorithms remain statistically indistinguishable across datasets that differ in a single entry. While guaranteeing DP generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Yizhou Zhang , Kishan Panaganti , Laixi Shi , Juba Ziani , Adam Wierman

The problem of combinatorial multi-armed bandits with probabilistically triggered arms (CMAB-T) has been extensively studied. Prior work primarily focuses on either the online setting where an agent learns about the unknown environment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Kongchang Zhou , Tingyu Zhang , Wei Chen , Fang Kong

We study a generalization of the problem of online learning in adversarial linear contextual bandits by incorporating loss functions that belong to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, which allows for a more flexible modeling of complex…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-04 Gergely Neu , Julia Olkhovskaya , Sattar Vakili

This work studies the statistical limits of uniform convergence for offline policy evaluation (OPE) problems with model-based methods (for episodic MDP) and provides a unified framework towards optimal learning for several well-motivated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Ming Yin , Yu-Xiang Wang

In many fields such as digital marketing, healthcare, finance, and robotics, it is common to have a well-tested and reliable baseline policy running in production (e.g., a recommender system). Nonetheless, the baseline policy is often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-11 Evrard Garcelon , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Alessandro Lazaric , Matteo Pirotta

Multi-armed bandit models have proven to be useful in modeling many real world problems in the areas of control and sequential decision making with partial information. However, in many scenarios, such as those prevalent in healthcare and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-27 Qinyang He , Yonatan Mintz

Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits is a well-known and accepted online optimization algorithm, that is used in many Web experiences to tailor content or presentation to users' traffic. Much has been published on theoretical guarantees (e.g.…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-07-12 David Abensur , Ivan Balashov , Shaked Bar , Ronny Lempel , Nurit Moscovici , Ilan Orlov , Danny Rosenstein , Ido Tamir