Related papers: Sample-efficient Nonstationary Policy Evaluation f…
Evaluating the performance of an ongoing policy plays a vital role in many areas such as medicine and economics, to provide crucial instructions on the early-stop of the online experiment and timely feedback from the environment. Policy…
In this work we revisit two classic high-dimensional online learning problems, namely linear regression and contextual bandits, from the perspective of adversarial robustness. Existing works in algorithmic robust statistics make strong…
Static supervised learning-in which experimental data serves as a training sample for the estimation of an optimal treatment assignment policy-is a commonly assumed framework of policy learning. An arguably more realistic but challenging…
Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…
We propose the first contextual bandit algorithm that is parameter-free, efficient, and optimal in terms of dynamic regret. Specifically, our algorithm achieves dynamic regret $\mathcal{O}(\min\{\sqrt{ST},…
Learning auxiliary tasks, such as multiple predictions about the world, can provide many benefits to reinforcement learning systems. A variety of off-policy learning algorithms have been developed to learn such predictions, but as yet there…
This thesis aims to study some of the mathematical challenges that arise in the analysis of statistical sequential decision-making algorithms for postoperative patients follow-up. Stochastic bandits (multiarmed, contextual) model the…
Robust Policy Search is the problem of learning policies that do not degrade in performance when subject to unseen environment model parameters. It is particularly relevant for transferring policies learned in a simulation environment to…
Equitably allocating limited resources in high-stakes domains-such as education, employment, and healthcare-requires balancing short-term utility with long-term impact, while accounting for delayed outcomes, hidden heterogeneity, and…
New ranking algorithms are continually being developed and refined, necessitating the development of efficient methods for evaluating these rankers. Online ranker evaluation focuses on the challenge of efficiently determining, from implicit…
We provide the first oracle efficient sublinear regret algorithms for adversarial versions of the contextual bandit problem. In this problem, the learner repeatedly makes an action on the basis of a context and receives reward for the…
Standard approaches to decision-making under uncertainty focus on sequential exploration of the space of decisions. However, \textit{simultaneously} proposing a batch of decisions, which leverages available resources for parallel…
We study policy evaluation of offline contextual bandits subject to unobserved confounders. Sensitivity analysis methods are commonly used to estimate the policy value under the worst-case confounding over a given uncertainty set. However,…
We considered a novel practical problem of online learning with episodically revealed rewards, motivated by several real-world applications, where the contexts are nonstationary over different episodes and the reward feedbacks are not…
Online learning algorithms, widely used to power search and content optimization on the web, must balance exploration and exploitation, potentially sacrificing the experience of current users in order to gain information that will lead to…
We study budget-constrained contextual bandits with adversarial contexts, where each action yields a random reward and incurs a random cost. We adopt the standard realizability assumption: conditioned on the observed context, rewards and…
Over the past decade, contextual bandit algorithms have been gaining in popularity due to their effectiveness and flexibility in solving sequential decision problems---from online advertising and finance to clinical trial design and…
Off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved notable success in tackling many complex real-world tasks, by leveraging previously collected data for policy learning. However, most existing off-policy RL algorithms fail to maximally…
We address the problem of learning in an online setting where the learner repeatedly observes features, selects among a set of actions, and receives reward for the action taken. We provide the first efficient algorithm with an optimal…
Contextual bandit algorithms have transformed modern experimentation by enabling real-time adaptation for personalized treatment and efficient use of data. Yet these advantages create challenges for statistical inference due to adaptivity.…