Bakhtiari, Lattimore and Szepesvári (COLT 2025) proved that Thompson sampling (TS) has Bayesian regret $\tilde O(d^{5/2}\sqrt n)$ for bandit convex optimisation with convex \emph{monotone} ridge losse...
arXiv:2608. 15365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Regret minimization (RM) and best-arm identification (BAI) are two fundamental objectives in multi-armed bandits.
By Jingxin Zhan, Yuze Han, Zhihua Zhang
Multi-armed bandit algorithms are evaluated by regret, yet comparable regret can coexist with different allocations across independent runs. We study the trade-off between worst-case regret $\mathcal{R}_{K,T}$ and instability $\mathcal S_{K,T}$, defined as the largest standard deviation of a terminal pull count, for $K$ arms and $T$ rounds.
arXiv:2603. 25029v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study online convex optimization (OCO) with two-point bandit feedback against a non-anticipating adaptive adversary.
By Haishan Ye
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.
By Nicolas Gutowski, Fabien Chhel, Alexandre Letard, Sylvain Lamprier
arXiv:2309. 06349v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Thompson sampling (TS) is one of the most popular and earliest algorithms to solve stochastic multi-armed bandit problems.
By Prateek Jaiswal, Debdeep Pati, Anirban Bhattacharya, Bani K. Mallick
arXiv:2607. 19854v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study horizon-free regret minimization for finite-horizon time-homogeneous tabular Markov decision processes with $S$ states, $A$ actions, horizon $H$, and per-trajectory total reward bounded by $1$.
By Runlong Zhou, Zihan Zhang, Maryam Fazel, Simon S. Du
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.
By Joel Q. L. Chang
arXiv:2608. 17841v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-armed bandit algorithms are evaluated by regret, yet comparable regret can coexist with different allocations across independent runs.
By Kaifei Wang, Yinyu Ye, Han Zhong
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:2608.12134v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: We study nonnegative submodular maximization on $n$ elements subject to a general matroid of rank $k$, when the offline algorithm is given an...
By Vaneet Aggarwal
arXiv:2607. 13402v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In bandit problems, standard regret-minimizing algorithms treat exploration as an amortized cost, which can expose early participants to unfair ex-ante losses in settings such as clinical trials.
By Dhruv Sarkar, Soumyadeep Dutta, Sayak Ray Chowdhury