Related papers: R-UCB: a Contextual Bandit Algorithm for Risk-Awar…
In online recommendation, customers arrive in a sequential and stochastic manner from an underlying distribution and the online decision model recommends a chosen item for each arriving individual based on some strategy. We study how to…
Clustering bandits have gained significant attention in recommender systems by leveraging collaborative information from neighboring users to better capture target user preferences. However, these methods often lack a clear definition of…
Many applications require a learner to make sequential decisions given uncertainty regarding both the system's payoff function and safety constraints. In safety-critical systems, it is paramount that the learner's actions do not violate the…
We propose $\tt RandUCB$, a bandit strategy that builds on theoretically derived confidence intervals similar to upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms, but akin to Thompson sampling (TS), it uses randomization to trade off exploration and…
Learning effective negotiation strategies poses two key challenges: the exploration-exploitation dilemma and dealing with large action spaces. However, there is an absence of learning-based approaches that effectively address these…
This paper aims to put forward the concept that learning to take safe actions in unknown environments, even with probability one guarantees, can be achieved without the need for an unbounded number of exploratory trials, provided that one…
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…
In this paper, we investigate the impact of context diversity on stochastic linear contextual bandits. As opposed to the previous view that contexts lead to more difficult bandit learning, we show that when the contexts are sufficiently…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a ubiquitous decision-making problem that exemplifies the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. Standard formulations exclude risk in decision making. Risk notably complicates the basic reward-maximising…
Individual decision-makers consume information revealed by the previous decision makers, and produce information that may help in future decisions. This phenomenon is common in a wide range of scenarios in the Internet economy, as well as…
This paper studies an exponential bandit model in which a group of agents collectively decide whether to undertake a risky action $R$. This action is implemented if the fraction of agents voting for it exceeds a predetermined threshold $k$.…
The matrix contextual bandit (CB), as an extension of the well-known multi-armed bandit, is a powerful framework that has been widely applied in sequential decision-making scenarios involving low-rank structure. In many real-world…
Delivering treatment recommendations via pervasive electronic devices such as mobile phones has the potential to be a viable and scalable treatment medium for long-term health behavior management. But active experimentation of treatment…
Originally motivated by default risk management applications, this paper investigates a novel problem, referred to as the profitable bandit problem here. At each step, an agent chooses a subset of the K possible actions. For each action…
Online platforms in the Internet Economy commonly incorporate recommender systems that recommend products (or "arms") to users (or "agents"). A key challenge in this domain arises from myopic agents who are naturally incentivized to exploit…
This paper investigates stochastic and adversarial combinatorial multi-armed bandit problems. In the stochastic setting under semi-bandit feedback, we derive a problem-specific regret lower bound, and discuss its scaling with the dimension…
In this paper, we investigate a new multi-armed bandit (MAB) online learning model that considers real-world phenomena in many recommender systems: (i) the learning agent cannot pull the arms by itself and thus has to offer rewards to users…
Motivated by concerns about making online decisions that incur undue amount of risk at each time step, in this paper, we formulate the probably anytime-safe stochastic combinatorial semi-bandits problem. In this problem, the agent is given…
Multi-armed bandit problems are considered as a paradigm of the trade-off between exploring the environment to find profitable actions and exploiting what is already known. In the stationary case, the distributions of the rewards do not…
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…