arXiv:2606. 08410v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Personalized decision-making in multi-objective bandits requires learning user-specific trade-offs among competing objectives.
By Linfeng Cao, Ming Shi, Ness B. Shroff
arXiv:2607. 09015v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study contextual bandit problems with correlated arms and access to surrogate reward signals produced by a machine learning model, motivated by applications such as large language model (LLM) routing.
By Ajay Narayanan Sridhar, Ronak Singh, Mehrdad Mahdavi, Vijaykrishnan Narayanan
arXiv:2608. 06750v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Iterative refinement has significantly enhanced Large Language Model (LLM) performance; however, existing methods ranging from feedback-based Self-Refine to traditional bandit approaches often rely on static options or overlook the saturation effect.
By Shion Ishikawa, Pablo Loyola, Young-joo Chung, Yun Ching Liu
The paper investigates preference-based bandits where a learner selects pairs of arms and receives binary preference feedback modeled by Bradley–Terry. It introduces the locally sensitive eluder dimension, a new complexity measure for logistic preference feedback, and proposes the GINOP algorithm that uses log-loss confidence sets to balance optimism and exploration. The authors prove a first-order regret bound showing that learning with preference feedback can be as statistically efficient as learning from direct rewards, and they validate their theory with empirical experiments.
By Ahmed Ben Yahmed (CREST, ENSAE Paris, FAIRPLAY), Marc Abeille (FAIRPLAY), Cl\'ement Calauz\`enes (FAIRPLAY)
arXiv:2608. 06559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contextual bandits offer a natural framework for sample-efficient personalization, but practical deployment remains difficult under sparse, biased interaction data, unreliable uncertainty estimates, and severe cold starts.
By Devansh Gupta, Shiv Tavker, Dmitry Efimov, Suchitra Sathyanarayana, Gitanjali Bhutani, Boris N. Oreshkin
The paper introduces a hierarchical Bayesian framework for multi-task contextual bandits, capturing both heterogeneity and correlations among bandit instances. It proposes an empirical Bayesian method to estimate the covariance matrix of the prior, leading to two new algorithms—ebmTS and ebmUCB—that incorporate this prior into decision making. The authors provide frequentist regret bounds and show through synthetic and real-world experiments that these algorithms outperform existing methods, especially in complex settings.
By Xia Jiang, Rong J. B. Zhu
arXiv:2604. 00531v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-task representation learning exploits the shared structure among related tasks by learning a common latent representation, thereby improving sample efficiency.
By Jiabin Lin, Shana Moothedath
The paper presents an improved analysis of non‑consecutive gradient variation in Bandit Convex Optimization (BCO) with two‑point feedback, leading to better dimension dependence for both convex and strongly convex functions compared to prior work. It also derives new problem‑dependent guarantees such as gradient‑variance and small‑loss regret bounds, extends the technique to one‑point bandit linear optimization over hyper‑rectangular domains, and establishes the first gradient‑variation dynamic and universal regret bounds for two‑point BCO.
By Hang Yu, Yu-Hu Yan, Peng Zhao
arXiv:2608. 11873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we extend the Dependent Click Model (DCM) Bandits to a multiplayer information-asymmetric setting, where multiple agents interact with a shared ranked list and may observe multiple clicks per session, introducing new challenges for selection strategies.
By Andy Wang, Charlton Shih, William Chang
arXiv:2609.13564v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study KL-regularized contextual bandits under both reward and preference feedback. We show that greedy sampling can achieve logarithmic regret witho...
By Zichen Wang, Haoyang Hong, Huazheng Wang
arXiv:2608. 15949v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled their use as conversational recommender systems (CRS), demonstrating strong recommendation accuracy and natural dialogue.
By Cedar Site Bai, Duanshun Li, Zhenyu Liao, Sheikh Sarwar, Huiyuan Chen, Yuan Chen, Changhe Yuan, Haiyang Zhang, Qilin Qi
The paper introduces Latent Order Bandits (LOB), a new bandit framework that relaxes the strict assumptions of traditional latent bandits by only requiring a partial order of action preferences within each latent state. LOB allows instances sharing the same state to have different reward distributions as long as the action ranking remains consistent, making it suitable for scenarios like user groups on streaming services who agree on genre preferences but rate differently. The authors present an upper‑confidence bound algorithm for both total and partial latent orders, provide regret bounds, and propose a posterior‑sampling variant that empirically outperforms full‑prior latent bandits when reward scales vary across instances sharing the same latent state.
By Emil Carlsson, Newton Mwai, Fredrik D. Johansson