cs.LGJul 1, 2026

Distributed Online Bandit Submodular Maximization with Bounded Sampling Violations

Authors: Bin DuChang LiuDingqi ZhuLintao YeDengfeng Sun

Organizations: College of Automation Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 211106, China · School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China · School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47906, USA

Abstract

We study distributed online submodular maximization under partition matroid constraints, in which multiple agents select a limited number of actions from their own subsets sequentially to maximize the cumulative value of a sequence of objective functions. We develop a unified algorithmic framework that accommodates full-information and bandit feedback models. For both feedback models, we prove that the proposed algorithms achieve sublinear (11/e)(1-1/e)-regret guarantees, which are comparable to those achieved by existing centralized counterparts. Furthermore, to tackle the sampling violation issue caused by continuous relaxation and rounding, we develop a bounded stochastic pipage rounding scheme and show that the probability of sampling violation vanishes asymptotically. As a result, the cumulative sampling violation remains sublinear in TT, which is further shown to be not improvable under certain conditions. Numerical results validate the theoretical findings in this paper.

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