arXiv Machine Learning

Meritocratic Fairness via $K$-Shapley Values in Budgeted Combinatorial Bandits with Full-Bandit Feedback

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.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 15

Price of Fairness in Bandits: A Tight Minimax Characterization

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. Recent work addresses this by evaluating the sequence of per-round expected rewards through the generalized $p$-mean, interpolating between utilitarian welfare ($p=1$), Nash welfare ($p\to0$), and Rawlsian fairness ($p\to-\infty$).

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 15

Optimal and Efficient Contextual Combinatorial Semi-bandits with General Function Approximation

We study the contextual combinatorial semi-bandit (CCSB) problem with general reward function approximation. At each round, the learner observes a context, selects a combinatorial action consisting of a subset of basic arms, and receives the reward of each selected arm; the goal is to maximize the cumulative reward over time.