cs.LGApr 1, 2026

Lipschitz Dueling Bandits over Continuous Action Spaces

Authors: Mudit Sharma, Shweta Jain, Vaneet Aggarwal, Ganesh Ghalme

Organizations: Indian Institute of Technology Ropar · Purdue University · Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad

Abstract

We study for the first time, stochastic dueling bandits over continuous action spaces with Lipschitz structure, where feedback is purely comparative. While dueling bandits and Lipschitz bandits have been studied separately, their combination has remained unexplored. We propose the first algorithm for Lipschitz dueling bandits, using round-based exploration and recursive region elimination guided by an adaptive reference arm. We develop new analytical tools for relative feedback and prove a regret bound of O~(Tdz+1dz+2)\tilde O\left(T^{\frac{d_z+1}{d_z+2}}\right), where dzd_z is the zooming dimension of the near-optimal region. Further, our algorithm takes only logarithmic space in terms of the total time horizon, best achievable by any bandit algorithm over a continuous action space.

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