arXiv:2607. 02150v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper studies additive regret in the multi-secretary problem, defined as the gap between the expected offline prophet reward and the reward of the best online policy.
This paper studies additive regret in the multi-secretary problem, defined as the gap between the expected offline prophet reward and the reward of the best online policy. Prior work established \(O(\log T)\) regret for bounded-density distributions with connected support and \(O((\log T)^2)\) upper bounds for bounded-density distributions with support gaps.
The paper investigates online fair allocation of sequential items to agents with heterogeneous preferences, aiming to maximize generalized-mean welfare. In an i.i.d. arrival setting, a pure greedy algorithm achieves near-optimal “~O(1/T)” average regret without needing distributional knowledge. For nonstationary arrivals, the authors show that a single historical sample per distribution suffices to recover the same regret rate, using re-solving algorithms that remain robust to distribution shifts.
We prove that $ρ\text{-}\mathrm{NPTS}_{\mathrm{SG}}$, an anchor-free nonparametric Thompson Sampling algorithm for risk-averse bandits, achieves regret matching the instance-dependent lower bound to leading order in $\log n$, establishing it as asymptotically optimal for any continuous risk functional $ρ$ (CVaR, mean-variance, Sharpe ratio, distortion risk measures, and more) on the class of distributions with bounded density and sub-Gaussian tails, including Gaussian arms. Both this result and its bounded-support counterpart require only continuity of $ρ$: strictly weaker than the dominance condition of prior parametric Thompson Sampling results, and strictly weaker than the Lipschitz condition of UCB-type algorithms, yielding the first instance-optimal guarantees for non-Lipschitz functionals such as the Sharpe ratio without parametric reward assumptions.
arXiv:2606. 00835v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Network routers that enforce Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees must decide, at every clock cycle, which expiring packet of information to transmit, even when the value of the packet is unknown until it is processed.
arXiv:2605.15692v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study episodic reinforcement learning with fixed reward and transition functions, but with episode-dependent admissible action sets that a...
arXiv:2606. 09191v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove that $\rho\text{-}\mathrm{NPTS}_{\mathrm{SG}}$, an anchor-free nonparametric Thompson Sampling algorithm for risk-averse bandits, achieves regret matching the instance-dependent lower bound to leading order in $\log n$, establishing it as asymptotically optimal for any continuous risk functional $\rho$ (CVaR, mean-variance, Sharpe ratio, distortion risk measures, and more) on the class of distributions with bounded density and sub-Gaussian tails, including Gaussian arms.
arXiv:2607. 29460v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Heavy-tailed distributions arise naturally in sequential decision-making problems such as financial investment, online advertising, and network management, where rare but extreme outcomes can dominate performance.
arXiv:2607. 02196v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study online resource allocation when both rewards and consumption sizes may be continuously distributed.
The paper presents an efficient algorithm for repeated prophet inequalities with prefix feedback, achieving “~O(√T) expected regret”. It uses empirical backward induction, box‑specific reach bonuses, and a relative‑drop aggregation rule to eliminate polynomial dependence on the number of boxes. This resolves an open question from Liu et al. (2025).
arXiv:2606. 09668v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contextual queueing bandits provide a framework for learning to schedule heterogeneous jobs under unknown context-dependent service rates.
arXiv:2608. 08662v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The single-selection prophet inequality is a canonical Bayesian online selection problem in which independent nonnegative values arrive sequentially and the decision-maker must irrevocably select at most one.
arXiv:2607. 26273v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider a stochastic multi-objective bandit problem where, at each round, the agent selects a slate of $k$ arms and observes their $d$-dimensional reward vectors under semi-bandit feedback.