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We study a variant of causal contextual bandits where the context is chosen based on an initial intervention chosen by the learner. At the beginning of each round, the learner selects an initial action, depending on which a stochastic…
Thanks to the power of representation learning, neural contextual bandit algorithms demonstrate remarkable performance improvement against their classical counterparts. But because their exploration has to be performed in the entire neural…
We study the problem of stochastic contextual bandits in the agnostic setting, where the goal is to compete with the best policy in a given class without assuming realizability or imposing model restrictions on losses or rewards. In this…
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…
In this paper, we address the stochastic contextual linear bandit problem, where a decision maker is provided a context (a random set of actions drawn from a distribution). The expected reward of each action is specified by the inner…
This paper studies semiparametric contextual bandits, a generalization of the linear stochastic bandit problem where the reward for an action is modeled as a linear function of known action features confounded by an non-linear…
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…
Contextual bandits are a rich model for sequential decision making given side information, with important applications, e.g., in recommender systems. We propose novel algorithms for contextual bandits harnessing neural networks to…
We consider the stochastic linear (multi-armed) contextual bandit problem with the possibility of hidden simple multi-armed bandit structure in which the rewards are independent of the contextual information. Algorithms that are designed…
We introduce the problem of model selection for contextual bandits, where a learner must adapt to the complexity of the optimal policy while balancing exploration and exploitation. Our main result is a new model selection guarantee for…
We create a computationally tractable algorithm for contextual bandits with continuous actions having unknown structure. Our reduction-style algorithm composes with most supervised learning representations. We prove that it works in a…
We consider the problem of designing contextual bandit algorithms in the ``cross-learning'' setting of Balseiro et al., where the learner observes the loss for the action they play in all possible contexts, not just the context of the…
In this paper we consider the adversarial contextual bandit problem in metric spaces. The paper "Nearest neighbour with bandit feedback" tackled this problem but when there are many contexts near the decision boundary of the comparator…
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},…
We consider a multi-armed bandit problem where payoffs are a linear function of an observed stochastic contextual variable. In the scenario where there exists a gap between optimal and suboptimal rewards, several algorithms have been…
We propose an algorithmic framework, Offline Estimation to Decisions (OE2D), that reduces contextual bandit learning with general reward function approximation to offline regression. The framework allows near-optimal regret for contextual…
Contextual bandits are a form of multi-armed bandit in which the agent has access to predictive side information (known as the context) for each arm at each time step, and have been used to model personalized news recommendation, ad…
In statistical learning, algorithms for model selection allow the learner to adapt to the complexity of the best hypothesis class in a sequence. We ask whether similar guarantees are possible for contextual bandit learning.
We consider the model selection task in the stochastic contextual bandit setting. Suppose we are given a collection of base contextual bandit algorithms. We provide a master algorithm that combines them and achieves the same performance, up…
Most contextual bandit algorithms minimize regret against the best fixed policy, a questionable benchmark for non-stationary environments that are ubiquitous in applications. In this work, we develop several efficient contextual bandit…