Related papers: Resourceful Contextual Bandits
We address the problem of learning in an online, bandit setting where the learner must repeatedly select among $K$ actions, but only receives partial feedback based on its choices. We establish two new facts: First, using a new algorithm…
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…
Conservative mechanism is a desirable property in decision-making problems which balance the tradeoff between the exploration and exploitation. We propose the novel \emph{conservative contextual combinatorial cascading bandit…
We propose an efficient Context-Aware clustering of Bandits (CAB) algorithm, which can capture collaborative effects. CAB can be easily deployed in a real-world recommendation system, where multi-armed bandits have been shown to perform…
We consider contextual bandits with knapsacks, with an underlying structure between rewards generated and cost vectors suffered. We do so motivated by sales with commercial discounts. At each round, given the stochastic i.i.d.\ context…
We use surrogate losses to obtain several new regret bounds and new algorithms for contextual bandit learning. Using the ramp loss, we derive new margin-based regret bounds in terms of standard sequential complexity measures of a benchmark…
We consider the stochastic contextual bandit problem under the high dimensional linear model. We focus on the case where the action space is finite and random, with each action associated with a randomly generated contextual covariate. This…
In the dynamic landscape of online businesses, recommender systems are pivotal in enhancing user experiences. While traditional approaches have relied on static supervised learning, the quest for adaptive, user-centric recommendations has…
Recent work shows that when contexts are drawn i.i.d., linear contextual bandits can be reduced to single-context linear bandits. This ``contexts are cheap" perspective is highly advantageous, as it allows for sharper finite-time analyses…
We consider the problem of contextual bandits with stochastic experts, which is a variation of the traditional stochastic contextual bandit with experts problem. In our problem setting, we assume access to a class of stochastic experts,…
Safety is a desirable property that can immensely increase the applicability of learning algorithms in real-world decision-making problems. It is much easier for a company to deploy an algorithm that is safe, i.e., guaranteed to perform at…
This paper investigates off-policy evaluation in contextual bandits, aiming to quantify the performance of a target policy using data collected under a different and potentially unknown behavior policy. Recently, methods based on conformal…
We study bandit model selection in stochastic environments. Our approach relies on a meta-algorithm that selects between candidate base algorithms. We develop a meta-algorithm-base algorithm abstraction that can work with general classes of…
Multi-armed bandit models have proven to be useful in modeling many real world problems in the areas of control and sequential decision making with partial information. However, in many scenarios, such as those prevalent in healthcare and…
Time-constrained decision processes have been ubiquitous in many fundamental applications in physics, biology and computer science. Recently, restart strategies have gained significant attention for boosting the efficiency of…
We propose a contextual bandit based model to capture the learning and social welfare goals of a web platform in the presence of myopic users. By using payments to incentivize these agents to explore different items/recommendations, we show…
We consider a sequential assortment selection problem where the user choice is given by a multinomial logit (MNL) choice model whose parameters are unknown. In each period, the learning agent observes a $d$-dimensional contextual…
An adversarial bandit problem with memory constraints is studied where only the statistics of a subset of arms can be stored. A hierarchical learning policy that requires only a sublinear order of memory space in terms of the number of arms…
We study the sequential batch learning problem in linear contextual bandits with finite action sets, where the decision maker is constrained to split incoming individuals into (at most) a fixed number of batches and can only observe…
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…