Optimal Online Regret for Context-Lumpable Bandits

Abstract

We study stochastic contextual bandits with an unknown context-lumpable structure. The $S$ contexts are partitioned into $r$ blocks, and every arm has the same mean reward across contexts in the same block. Under arbitrary context distributions and without separation assumptions, we design an algorithm with expected regret $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{r(S+K)T})$, matching the lower bound of Lee et al. (2023) up to logarithmic factors and improving their previous upper bound by a factor of $r$. The algorithm operates over dyadic accuracy levels, using a baseline policy and confidence-based early stopping to control exploration. It then performs cross-context elimination: since rewards are identical within a block, one selected arm eliminates all surviving records from that block, requiring at most $r$ selections at each level. Multi-scale exploration assigns finer accuracies to frequent blocks and coarser accuracies to rare blocks, yielding a near-optimal arm for every block while keeping the weighted policy error small.