This paper studies Restless Multi‑Armed Bandits with individual penalty constraints for dynamic wireless networks, allowing each arm to have distinct performance limits such as energy, activation, or age of information. It introduces the Penalty‑Optimal Whittle (POW) index, which depends only on an arm’s transition kernel and its constraints, making it computable offline and independent of system‑wide parameters. The authors prove the POW index policy is asymptotically optimal, present a deep reinforcement learning method to learn the index online, and show through simulations that it outperforms existing policies.
arXiv:2606. 17489v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in edge-cloud inference systems to handle diverse user tasks with heterogeneous accuracy, latency, and cost profiles.
arXiv:2607. 13546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mobile crowdsensing (MC) recruits mobile users to perform sensing tasks using their smartphones, enabling large-scale applications such as traffic monitoring and environmental sensing.
Mobile crowdsensing (MC) recruits mobile users to perform sensing tasks using their smartphones, enabling large-scale applications such as traffic monitoring and environmental sensing. A fundamental challenge is online worker recruitment under uncertainty, where the platform must learn workers' sensing performance while operating with a limited budget.
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.
arXiv:2607. 23772v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study a restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problem for a stochastic deadline scheduling application.
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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 08977v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Motivated by the recency effect in online learning, we study algorithms for single-pass *sliding-window streaming multi-armed bandits (MABs)* in this paper.
The paper introduces a new algorithm for the Multi‑Armed Bandit problem that prioritizes selecting the arm with the lowest variance rather than the highest expected reward, using a softmax policy parameterization. It constructs an unbiased estimate of the minimal‑variance objective by drawing two independent samples from the chosen arm and proves convergence under natural conditions. Numerical experiments demonstrate the algorithm’s practical behavior and provide implementation guidance, while also addressing general risk‑aware trade‑offs between average reward and variance.
arXiv:2606. 00913v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-arm bandit algorithms are increasingly used in online platforms, clinical trials, and social science experiments, but valid statistical inference on their performance remains an open challenge.
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.
arXiv:2605. 01961v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning from human preference data is becoming a useful tool, from fine-tuning large language models to training reinforcement learning agents.