Characterizing Oblivious Common-Reward Multi-Player Bandits: Universal Stationarity, Coordination Traps, and Certified Global Rates

Mingxiao Li, Wenhai Lai, Hongyu Wang

This paper presents a theoretical analysis of the oblivious common-reward multi-player multi-armed bandit (OC-MPMAB), a minimal multi-player bandit model in which multiple players select arms simultaneously and observe only a shared reward. Crucially, the players are fully oblivious: they do not observe the actions of other players and do not even know whether any other players exist. The contributions of this work are threefold. First, we prove that the independent gradient-bandit updates applied by the players jointly form an unbiased stochastic gradient estimator of a hidden product-policy objective. This property then yields a universal finite-time first-order stationarity guarantee for every instance. Second, we show that stationarity cannot, in general, be strengthened to global optimality. To illustrate this, we identify a product-policy trap obstruction that rules out the guarantee of global optimality. Third, we show that global optimality can be recovered under structural assumptions on the reward table. To make global optimality achievable, we introduce finite-table certificates that separately characterize product-gradient dominance and self-bounding stochastic noise.…