Related papers: Resourceful Contextual Bandits
Regret bounds in online learning compare the player's performance to $L^*$, the optimal performance in hindsight with a fixed strategy. Typically such bounds scale with the square root of the time horizon $T$. The more refined concept of…
We consider the general (stochastic) contextual bandit problem under the realizability assumption, i.e., the expected reward, as a function of contexts and actions, belongs to a general function class $\mathcal{F}$. We design a fast and…
Real-world applications of contextual bandits often exhibit non-stationarity due to seasonality, serendipity, and evolving social trends. While a number of non-stationary contextual bandit learning algorithms have been proposed in the…
Reinforcement learning addresses the dilemma between exploration to find profitable actions and exploitation to act according to the best observations already made. Bandit problems are one such class of problems in stateless environments…
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…
In this paper, we investigate the stochastic contextual bandit with general function space and graph feedback. We propose an algorithm that addresses this problem by adapting to both the underlying graph structures and reward gaps. To the…
There are two variants of the classical multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem that have received considerable attention from machine learning researchers in recent years: contextual bandits and simple regret minimization. Contextual bandits are…
This paper studies bandit problems where an agent has access to offline data that might be utilized to potentially improve the estimation of each arm's reward distribution. A major obstacle in this setting is the existence of compound…
Model selection in contextual bandits is an important complementary problem to regret minimization with respect to a fixed model class. We consider the simplest non-trivial instance of model-selection: distinguishing a simple multi-armed…
We consider the problem where M agents collaboratively interact with an instance of a stochastic K-armed contextual bandit, where K>>M. The goal of the agents is to simultaneously minimize the cumulative regret over all the agents over a…
Recent advances in contextual bandit optimization and reinforcement learning have garnered interest in applying these methods to real-world sequential decision making problems. Real-world applications frequently have constraints with…
We study an online decision making problem where on each round a learner chooses a list of items based on some side information, receives a scalar feedback value for each individual item, and a reward that is linearly related to this…
We study offline data poisoning attacks in contextual bandits, a class of reinforcement learning problems with important applications in online recommendation and adaptive medical treatment, among others. We provide a general attack…
Preference-based feedback is important for many applications where direct evaluation of a reward function is not feasible. A notable recent example arises in reinforcement learning from human feedback on large language models. For many of…
Volunteer-based food rescue platforms tackle food waste by matching surplus food to communities in need. These platforms face the dual problem of maintaining volunteer engagement and maximizing the food rescued. Existing algorithms to…
The contextual bandit problem, which is a type of reinforcement learning tasks, provides an effective framework for solving challenges in recommendation systems, such as satisfying real-time requirements, enabling personalization,…
The deployment of Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) has become commonplace in many economic applications. However, regret guarantees for even state-of-the-art linear bandit algorithms (such as Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty Linear bandit…
Learning good interventions in a causal graph can be modelled as a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with side-information. First, we study this problem when interventions are more expensive than observations and a budget is specified.…
We study the benefits of sparsity in nonparametric contextual bandit problems, in which the set of candidate features is countably or uncountably infinite. Our contribution is two-fold. First, using a novel reduction to sequences of…
Bandit learning is characterized by the tension between long-term exploration and short-term exploitation. However, as has recently been noted, in settings in which the choices of the learning algorithm correspond to important decisions…