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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chakraborty, Sourav, Rege, Amit Kiran, Monteleoni, Claire, Chen, Lijun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.17315
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Table of Contents:
  • We introduce Flickering Multi-Armed Bandits (FMAB) to model sequential decision-making in environments with changing action availability, where accessibility of the next action is restricted to a subset dependent on the agent's current choice. We formalize these constraints through stochastically evolving graphs where actions are limited to local neighborhoods. This mobility-constrained structure imposes a dual challenge: the statistical requirement of information acquisition and the physical overhead of navigation. We analyze FMAB under i.i.d. Erdős--R'enyi and Edge-Markovian process, proposing a two-phase lazy random walk algorithm for robust exploration. We establish high-probability sublinear regret bounds and prove near-optimality via a matching information-theoretic lower bound. Our results characterize the intrinsic cost of learning under local-move constraints, complemented by a robotic disaster-response simulation.