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arXiv · 2605.27794

Learning to target with network interference

Xiaomeng Wang·Hamsa Bastani·Osbert Bastani·Zhimei Ren
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Abstract

This paper studies adaptive targeting under network interference in a bandit setting, where treatments applied to one individual may affect others through spillover effects. We consider a linear model in a sparse regime, where each individual's outcome can be affected by at most a few others. We first establish a regret lower bound showing that ignoring the network structure and reducing the problem to a standard linear bandit inevitably leads to inefficient learning, particularly in large populations. To understand how structural information can be leveraged, we analyze regimes with varying levels of knowledge of the interference structure: (1) full support knowledge, (2) knowledge of the column support sizes, and (3) no prior knowledge. For each regime, we establish regret lower bounds characterizing the fundamental limits of learning, and develop algorithms that achieve near-optimal regret. Together, our results provide a unified view of how knowledge of the interference structure governs the efficiency of online learning under interference, and offer practical adaptive targeting algorithms in each setting. Numerical experiments on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the practical benefits of our algorithms.

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Xiaomeng Wang, Hamsa Bastani, Osbert Bastani, Zhimei Ren. 2026-05-27. Learning to target with network interference. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27794

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