Related papers: Doubly Robust Policy Evaluation and Learning
In many real-world reinforcement learning applications, access to the environment is limited to a fixed dataset, instead of direct (online) interaction with the environment. When using this data for either evaluation or training of a new…
Estimating the effect of treatments from natural experiments, where treatments are pre-assigned, is an important and well-studied problem. We introduce a novel natural experiment dataset obtained from an early childhood literacy nonprofit.…
This paper introduces a novel contextual bandit algorithm for personalized pricing under utility fairness constraints in scenarios with uncertain demand, achieving an optimal regret upper bound. Our approach, which incorporates dynamic…
We introduce a novel framework to account for sensitivity to rewards uncertainty in sequential decision-making problems. While risk-sensitive formulations for Markov decision processes studied so far focus on the distribution of the…
Contextual bandits are widely-used in the study of learning-based control policies for finite action spaces. While the problem is well-studied for bandits with perfectly observed context vectors, little is known about the case of…
Asynchrony, overlaps and delays in sensory-motor signals introduce ambiguity as to which stimuli, actions, and rewards are causally related. Only the repetition of reward episodes helps distinguish true cause-effect relationships from…
Information-directed sampling (IDS) has recently demonstrated its potential as a data-efficient reinforcement learning algorithm. However, it is still unclear what is the right form of information ratio to optimize when contextual…
In the reinforcement learning literature, there are many algorithms developed for either Contextual Bandit (CB) or Markov Decision Processes (MDP) environments. However, when deploying reinforcement learning algorithms in the real world,…
The contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a widely used framework for problems requiring sequential decision-making under uncertainty, such as recommendation systems. In applications involving a large number of users, the performance of…
Motivated by scenarios of information diffusion and advertising in social media, we study an influence maximization problem in which little is assumed to be known about the diffusion network or about the model that determines how…
Information is often stored in a distributed and proprietary form, and agents who own information are often self-interested and require incentives to reveal their information. Suitable mechanisms are required to elicit and aggregate such…
The ability to exploit prior experience to solve novel problems rapidly is a hallmark of biological learning systems and of great practical importance for artificial ones. In the meta reinforcement learning literature much recent work has…
Reward-biased maximum likelihood estimation (RBMLE) is a classic principle in the adaptive control literature for tackling explore-exploit trade-offs. This paper studies the stochastic contextual bandit problem with general bounded reward…
Designing optimal reward functions has been desired but extremely difficult in reinforcement learning (RL). When it comes to modern complex tasks, sophisticated reward functions are widely used to simplify policy learning yet even a tiny…
Contextual bandits often provide simple and effective personalization in decision making problems, making them popular tools to deliver personalized interventions in mobile health as well as other health applications. However, when bandits…
In the classical contextual bandits problem, in each round $t$, a learner observes some context $c$, chooses some action $i$ to perform, and receives some reward $r_{i,t}(c)$. We consider the variant of this problem where in addition to…
We consider contextual linear bandits over networks, a class of sequential decision-making problems where learning occurs simultaneously across multiple locations and the reward distributions share structural similarities while also…
Contextual multi-armed bandits are a popular choice to model sequential decision-making. E.g., in a healthcare application we may perform various tests to asses a patient condition (exploration) and then decide on the best treatment to give…
We study constrained contextual bandits (CCB) with adversarially chosen contexts, where each action yields a random reward and incurs a random cost. We adopt the standard realizability assumption: conditioned on the observed context,…
We propose an estimator and confidence interval for computing the value of a policy from off-policy data in the contextual bandit setting. To this end we apply empirical likelihood techniques to formulate our estimator and confidence…