The paper studies repeated principal-agent games in a multi-armed bandit setting where the principal offers arm-specific incentives, the agent chooses an arm to maximize its own reward plus incentive, and the principal observes only the chosen arm and its own reward. Because the principal cannot see the agent’s reward, traditional estimation fails, so the authors develop an estimator based on the sequence of incentives and chosen arms, analogous to online inverse optimization. Using this estimator, they design a policy that achieves low (square‑root) regret and validate the approach with simulations for personalized incentive design in long‑term statin treatment.
By Ilgin Dogan, Zuo-Jun Max Shen, Anil Aswani
arXiv:2608. 09389v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This note aims to serve as an entry point to the literature on learning in games, a topic with significant theoretical appeal and a wide range of applications -- from machine learning and data science to economics and beyond.
By Panayotis Mertikopoulos
arXiv:2606. 19883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem in the competitive setup with two-sided matching markets under a human centric decision making model.
By Ananya Kunisetty, Avishek Ghosh
arXiv:2503. 01701v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Most microeconomic models of interest involve optimizing a piecewise linear function.
By Francesco Bacchiocchi, Matteo Castiglioni, Alberto Marchesi, Nicola Gatti
The paper studies the trade‑off between maximizing rewards and accurately estimating current treatment effects in nonstationary multi‑armed bandits. For $K$‑armed bandits with H"older‑smooth mean rewards, the authors derive minimax bounds on expected dynamic regret under a high‑probability simultaneous coverage requirement for all current effects. They propose the TRACE algorithm, which achieves a regret–precision trade‑off that separates reward‑learning regret from the unavoidable cost of refreshing current‑effect estimates, and extend the method with an empirical‑Bernstein e‑process to adapt exploration while preserving worst‑case guarantees.
By Sharan Sahu, Martin T. Wells
The paper investigates how to infer agents’ underlying incentives in strategic multi‑agent settings, where traditional inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) may fail to produce rewards that guide optimal play. It introduces the concept of strategic identifiability and shows that learning from a fixed pair of policies can be insufficient regardless of sample size. To address this, the authors propose an active IRL algorithm for two‑player repeated Stackelberg games, combining maximum‑likelihood estimation with experimental design to achieve finite‑sample guarantees on sub‑optimality, and validate the approach in an anti‑poaching scenario.
By Antoine Bergerault, Cyrille Kone, Giorgia Ramponi
Reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning is widely used in language model training to improve model performance on a target task while limiting drift from a reference policy. A standard way to balance this trade-off is via a KL-regularized RL objective, although this formulation does not by itself provide a principled way to set the regularization coefficient.
arXiv:2605. 00762v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study meritocratic fairness in budgeted combinatorial multi-armed bandits with full-bandit feedback, where a learner selects at most $K$ arms per time step and observes only the noisy aggregate reward of the selected set.
By Shradha Sharma, Shweta Jain, Swapnil Dhamal
arXiv:2607. 08012v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper studies an online variant of the assistance games framework, where an informed agent and an uninformed agent repeatedly interact over $T$ timesteps to optimize a common reward function.
By Nivasini Ananthakrishnan, Mark Bedaywi, Michael I. Jordan, Stuart Russell, Nika Haghtalab
The paper analyzes the oblivious common-reward multi-player multi-armed bandit (OC-MPMAB), where players act independently without observing others and only share a common reward. It shows that the players’ gradient-bandit updates form an unbiased estimator of a hidden product-policy objective, guaranteeing universal finite‑time first‑order stationarity. The work also identifies conditions under which global optimality cannot be achieved, introduces certificates to recover global optimality under structural assumptions, and establishes corresponding product‑policy gap and pseudo‑regret bounds.
By Mingxiao Li, Wenhai Lai, Hongyu Wang
arXiv:2507. 09473v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the dynamic allocation of indivisible resources to strategic agents under long-term constraints, where the planner aims to maximize social welfare, satisfy multiple constraints, and elicit near-truthful reports.
By Yan Dai, Negin Golrezaei, Patrick Jaillet
arXiv:2506. 03802v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a learning problem in a generalized two-sided matching market, where agents select actions to interact with their match.
By Andreas Athanasopoulos, Christos Dimitrakakis