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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Prevost, Adrien, Mathieu, Timothee, Maillard, Odalric-Ambrym
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19098
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Table of Contents:
  • We study the non-contextual multi-armed bandit problem in a transfer learning setting: before any pulls, the learner is given N'_k i.i.d. samples from each source distribution nu'_k, and the true target distributions nu_k lie within a known distance bound d_k(nu_k, nu'_k) <= L_k. In this framework, we first derive a problem-dependent asymptotic lower bound on cumulative regret that extends the classical Lai-Robbins result to incorporate the transfer parameters (d_k, L_k, N'_k). We then propose KL-UCB-Transfer, a simple index policy that matches this new bound in the Gaussian case. Finally, we validate our approach via simulations, showing that KL-UCB-Transfer significantly outperforms the no-prior baseline when source and target distributions are sufficiently close.