Related papers: A Neural Networks Committee for the Contextual Ban…

Online decision-making can be formulated as the popular stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where a learner makes decisions (or takes actions) to maximize cumulative rewards collected from an unknown environment. This paper proposes to…

For the non-stationary multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, many existing methods allow a general mechanism for the non-stationarity, but rely on a budget for the non-stationarity that is sub-linear to the total number of time steps $T$. In…

Contextual bandit algorithms have become popular for online recommendation systems such as Digg, Yahoo! Buzz, and news recommendation in general. \emph{Offline} evaluation of the effectiveness of new algorithms in these applications is…

We study a nonparametric contextual bandit problem where the expected reward functions belong to a H\"older class with smoothness parameter $\beta$. We show how this interpolates between two extremes that were previously studied in…

Focusing on Random Forests, we propose a multi-armed contextual bandit recommendation framework for feature-based selection of a single shallow tree of the learned ensemble. The trained system, which works on top of the Random Forest,…

In this paper, we address the contextual dueling bandit problem by proposing variance-aware algorithms that leverage neural networks to approximate nonlinear utility functions. Our approach employs a \textit{variance-aware exploration…

In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective…

We present substantial evidence demonstrating the benefits of integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with a Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit framework. Contextual bandits have been widely used in recommendation systems to generate…

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 consider the problem of learning to choose actions using contextual information when provided with limited feedback in the form of relative pairwise comparisons. We study this problem in the dueling-bandits framework of Yue et al.…

We consider a variant of the contextual bandit problem. In standard contextual bandits, when a user arrives we get the user's complete feature vector and then assign a treatment (arm) to that user. In a number of applications (like…

We study a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, where at each time step, the player observes an independently sampled context that determines the arms' mean rewards. However, playing an arm blocks it (across all contexts) for a…

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 Causal Bandit is a variant of the classic Bandit problem where an agent must identify the best action in a sequential decision-making process, where the reward distribution of the actions displays a non-trivial dependence structure that…

This paper addresses the poor finite-horizon performance of existing online \emph{restless bandit} (RB) algorithms, which stems from the prohibitive sample complexity of learning a full \emph{Markov decision process} (MDP) for each agent.…

In this paper, we study representation learning for multi-task decision-making in non-stationary environments. We consider the framework of sequential linear bandits, where the agent performs a series of tasks drawn from distinct sets…

Contextual bandits have become popular as they offer a middle ground between very simple approaches based on multi-armed bandits and very complex approaches using the full power of reinforcement learning. They have demonstrated success in…

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 propose a novel framework for decentralized, online learning by many learners. At each moment of time, an instance characterized by a certain context may arrive to each learner; based on the context, the learner can select…

Providing health monitoring devices with machine intelligence is important for enabling automatic mobile healthcare applications. However, this brings additional challenges due to the resource scarcity of these devices. This work introduces…