arXiv:2606. 06178v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) present a trade-off between performance and cost, where more powerful models incur greater expense.
By Jiahao Zeng, Ming Tang, Ningning Ding
arXiv:2609.37800v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Many recommender services repeatedly encounter cold-start cohorts, where new users arrive with little or no interaction history. This creates two cha...
By Serafima Lebedeva, Sumantrak Mukherjee, Ali Arshad Sadal, Ilias Ek\c{s}i, Rahul Sharma, Julia Mueller, Theresa Dombrowski, Jakob Karolus, Viktor Bengs, Eyke H\"ullermeier, Sebastian Vollmer
arXiv:2609.38860v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Learning from human preferences is central to large language model (LLM) alignment, but human preference annotation is costly. Active preference lear...
By Zhongman Du, Huiming Zhang, Haodong Zhu, Baochang Zhang
The paper introduces a new variant of the multi‑armed bandit problem that incorporates dueling feedback—pairwise comparisons of model responses—and heterogeneous sampling costs to identify the best large language model (LLM) from a set with varying query costs. Assuming a Condorcet winner, the authors propose a Track‑and‑Stop style algorithm that guarantees asymptotically optimal cost as the error probability approaches zero. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real‑world data show that this cost‑aware approach consistently outperforms both classical cost‑unaware algorithms and other cost‑aware extensions.
By Sarvesh Gharat, Nikhil Karamchandani, Jayakrishnan Nair
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 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
The paper introduces Online Hyperparameter Optimization (OHPO), framing it as an infinitely many‑armed bandit problem over mixed and conditional search spaces. It proposes the IMABO framework, which couples any bandit policy with any oracle for proposing new configurations, and presents IMOSS—a restart‑free anytime policy with provable regret bounds. Experiments show that IMABO, combined with practical oracles such as TPE, an incumbent‑mutation oracle, and a pretrained tabular foundation model, outperforms random search across a range of settings from classical ML models to LLM‑based agents.
By Louis Abraham, Tuan-Anh Nguyen, Nicolas Devatine
arXiv:2603. 09692v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become the standard for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its efficacy is bottlenecked by the high cost of acquiring preference data, especially in low-resource and expert domains.
By Davit Melikidze, Marian Schneider, Jessica Lam, Martin Wertich, Ido Hakimi, Barna P\'asztor, Andreas Krause
arXiv:2607. 23765v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve impressive performance across multiple domains, but using the most capable model for every query is prohibitive at scale.
By Yifei Li, Zihui Gao, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan
arXiv:2609.05820v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study adaptive routing of prompts to large language model (LLM) experts to maximize response quality in an online setting with limited feedback. We...
By Wang Wei, Soumyabrata Pal, Koyel Mukherjee, Franck Dernoncourt, Ryan A. Rossi, Branislav Kveton, Hoda Eldardiry
arXiv:2604. 17244v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents for sequential decision-making struggle to produce diverse outputs.
By Priya Gurjar, Md Farhan Ishmam, Kenneth Marino
arXiv:2604. 05859v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits (CMABs) for non-episodic decision-making problems where the context includes both textual and numerical information (e.
By Uljad Berdica, Fernando Acero, Anton Ipsen, Parisa Zehtabi, Michael Cashmore, Manuela Veloso