Related papers: Sample-efficient Nonstationary Policy Evaluation f…
We consider an online decision making setting known as contextual bandit problem, and propose an approach for improving contextual bandit performance by using an adaptive feature extraction (representation learning) based on online…
We study online resource allocation under non-stationary demand with a minimum offline data requirement. In this problem, a decision-maker must allocate multiple types of resources to sequentially arriving queries over a finite horizon.…
Even when unable to run experiments, practitioners can evaluate prospective policies, using previously logged data. However, while the bandits literature has adopted a diverse set of objectives, most research on off-policy evaluation to…
We present a new approach to the problems of evaluating and learning personalized decision policies from observational data of past contexts, decisions, and outcomes. Only the outcome of the enacted decision is available and the historical…
We study nonparametric contextual bandits under batch constraints, where the expected reward for each action is modeled as a smooth function of covariates, and the policy updates are made at the end of each batch of observations. We…
Contextual bandits serve as a fundamental model for many sequential decision making tasks. The most popular theoretically justified approaches are based on the optimism principle. While these algorithms can be practical, they are known to…
Contextual bandit algorithms are increasingly replacing non-adaptive A/B tests in e-commerce, healthcare, and policymaking because they can both improve outcomes for study participants and increase the chance of identifying good or even…
We study the problem of estimating the expected reward of the optimal policy in the stochastic disjoint linear bandit setting. We prove that for certain settings it is possible to obtain an accurate estimate of the optimal policy value even…
In many domains, the exploration process of reinforcement learning will be too costly as it requires trying out suboptimal policies, resulting in a need for off-policy evaluation, in which a target policy is evaluated based on data…
Many efficient algorithms with strong theoretical guarantees have been proposed for the contextual multi-armed bandit problem. However, applying these algorithms in practice can be difficult because they require domain expertise to build…
Most reinforcement learning methods are based upon the key assumption that the transition dynamics and reward functions are fixed, that is, the underlying Markov decision process is stationary. However, in many real-world applications, this…
We consider the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in contextual bandits, where the goal is to estimate the value of a target policy using the data collected by a logging policy. Most popular approaches to the OPE are variants of the…
The (contextual) multi-armed bandit problem (MAB) provides a formalization of sequential decision-making which has many applications. However, validly evaluating MAB policies is challenging; we either resort to simulations which inherently…
A fundamental challenge in contextual bandits is to develop flexible, general-purpose algorithms with computational requirements no worse than classical supervised learning tasks such as classification and regression. Algorithms based on…
Non-stationary bandits and online clustering of bandits lift the restrictive assumptions in contextual bandits and provide solutions to many important real-world scenarios. Though the essence in solving these two problems overlaps…
Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated notable progress in sample efficiency, spanning both model-based and model-free paradigms. Despite the identification and mitigation of specific bottlenecks in prior…
Contextual bandits, which leverage the baseline features of sequentially arriving individuals to optimize cumulative rewards while balancing exploration and exploitation, are critical for online decision-making. Existing approaches…
Uniform random exploration in decision-making systems supports off-policy learning via supervision but incurs high regret, making it impractical for many applications. Conversely, non-uniform exploration offers better immediate performance…
We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) in the problem of slate contextual bandits where a policy selects multi-dimensional actions known as slates. This problem is widespread in recommender systems, search engines, marketing, to medical…
Online recommender systems often face long delays in receiving feedback, especially when optimizing for some long-term metrics. While mitigating the effects of delays in learning is well-understood in stationary environments, the problem…