English
Related papers

Related papers: Conformal-Style Quantile Analyses for Stochastic B…

200 papers

This paper presents a finite-time analysis of the KL-UCB algorithm, an online, horizon-free index policy for stochastic bandit problems. We prove two distinct results: first, for arbitrary bounded rewards, the KL-UCB algorithm satisfies a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-08-30 Aurélien Garivier , Olivier Cappé

Adaptively collected data has become ubiquitous within modern practice. However, even seemingly benign adaptive sampling schemes can introduce severe biases, rendering traditional statistical inference tools inapplicable. This can be…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-12-02 Wei Fan , Kevin Tan , Yuting Wei

We consider a variant of the classic multi-armed bandit problem where the expected reward of each arm is a function of an unknown parameter. The arms are divided into different groups, each of which has a common parameter. Therefore, when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-23 Zhiyang Wang , Ruida Zhou , Cong Shen

We study contextual bandits with budget and time constraints, referred to as constrained contextual bandits.The time and budget constraints significantly complicate the exploration and exploitation tradeoff because they introduce complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-10-20 Huasen Wu , R. Srikant , Xin Liu , Chong Jiang

In this paper, we study the behavior of the Upper Confidence Bound-Variance (UCB-V) algorithm for the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problems, a variant of the canonical Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithm that incorporates variance estimates…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-18 Yingying Fan , Yuxuan Han , Jinchi Lv , Xiaocong Xu , Zhengyuan Zhou

We study the heavy-tailed stochastic bandit problem in the cooperative multi-agent setting, where a group of agents interact with a common bandit problem, while communicating on a network with delays. Existing algorithms for the stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-17 Abhimanyu Dubey , Alex Pentland

We study bandit learning in matching markets, where players and arms constitute the two market sides, and the players' utilities are linear in the arm contexts. In each round, new arms arrive with observable contexts. Then, the algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Shiyun Lin , Simon Mauras , Vianney Perchet , Nadav Merlis

The multi-armed bandit formalism has been extensively studied under various attack models, in which an adversary can modify the reward revealed to the player. Previous studies focused on scenarios where the attack value either is bounded at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Ziwei Guan , Kaiyi Ji , Donald J Bucci , Timothy Y Hu , Joseph Palombo , Michael Liston , Yingbin Liang

We consider stochastic bandit problems with a continuous set of arms and where the expected reward is a continuous and unimodal function of the arm. No further assumption is made regarding the smoothness and the structure of the expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-09 Richard Combes , Alexandre Proutiere

We propose $\tt RandUCB$, a bandit strategy that builds on theoretically derived confidence intervals similar to upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms, but akin to Thompson sampling (TS), it uses randomization to trade off exploration and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-24 Sharan Vaswani , Abbas Mehrabian , Audrey Durand , Branislav Kveton

This paper investigates stochastic and adversarial combinatorial multi-armed bandit problems. In the stochastic setting under semi-bandit feedback, we derive a problem-specific regret lower bound, and discuss its scaling with the dimension…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-11-09 Richard Combes , M. Sadegh Talebi , Alexandre Proutiere , Marc Lelarge

In this paper, we propose and study opportunistic bandits - a new variant of bandits where the regret of pulling a suboptimal arm varies under different environmental conditions, such as network load or produce price. When the load/price is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-03 Huasen Wu , Xueying Guo , Xin Liu

In this paper we investigate the problem of stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB) in the (local) differential privacy (DP/LDP) model. Unlike previous results that assume bounded/sub-Gaussian reward distributions, we focus on the setting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-25 Youming Tao , Yulian Wu , Peng Zhao , Di Wang

Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) is arguably the most commonly used method for linear multi-arm bandit problems. While conceptually and computationally simple, this method highly relies on the confidence bounds, failing to strike the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-05 Kaige Yang , Laura Toni

I introduce and analyse an anytime version of the Optimally Confident UCB (OCUCB) algorithm designed for minimising the cumulative regret in finite-armed stochastic bandits with subgaussian noise. The new algorithm is simple, intuitive (in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-09 Tor Lattimore

We study a strategic variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, which we coin the strategic click-bandit. This model is motivated by applications in online recommendation where the choice of recommended items depends on both the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Thomas Kleine Buening , Aadirupa Saha , Christos Dimitrakakis , Haifeng Xu

We study the multi-armed bandit problem where the rewards are realizations of general non-stationary stochastic processes, a setting that generalizes many existing lines of work and analyses. In particular, we present a theoretical analysis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-04 Corinna Cortes , Giulia DeSalvo , Vitaly Kuznetsov , Mehryar Mohri , Scott Yang

This paper studies the problem of adaptively sampling from K distributions (arms) in order to identify the largest gap between any two adjacent means. We call this the MaxGap-bandit problem. This problem arises naturally in approximate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-04 Sumeet Katariya , Ardhendu Tripathy , Robert Nowak

In this paper, we investigate the stochastic contextual bandit with general function space and graph feedback. We propose an algorithm that addresses this problem by adapting to both the underlying graph structures and reward gaps. To the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Xueping Gong , Jiheng Zhang

During online decision making in Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB), one needs to conduct inference on the true mean reward of each arm based on data collected so far at each step. However, since the arms are adaptively selected--thereby yielding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-29 Maria Dimakopoulou , Zhimei Ren , Zhengyuan Zhou