Related papers: Counterfactual Risk Minimization: Learning from Lo…
Bandits with feedback graphs are powerful online learning models that interpolate between the full information and classic bandit problems, capturing many real-life applications. A recent work by Zhang et al. (2023) studies the contextual…
When learning from a batch of logged bandit feedback, the discrepancy between the policy to be learned and the off-policy training data imposes statistical and computational challenges. Unlike classical supervised learning and online…
Reinforcement learning algorithms are generally designed to maximize the expected return across a population. However, a policy that is optimal on average may be suboptimal for certain individuals, leading to potential safety concerns. To…
We propose the first boosting algorithm for off-policy learning from logged bandit feedback. Unlike existing boosting methods for supervised learning, our algorithm directly optimizes an estimate of the policy's expected reward. We analyze…
Counterfactual evaluation can estimate Click-Through-Rate (CTR) differences between ranking systems based on historical interaction data, while mitigating the effect of position bias and item-selection bias. We introduce the novel…
We address policy learning with logged data in contextual bandits. Current offline-policy learning algorithms are mostly based on inverse propensity score (IPS) weighting requiring the logging policy to have \emph{full support} i.e. a…
We study how to use naturally available user feedback, such as clicks, to optimize large language model (LLM) pipelines for generating personalized sentences using prompts. Naive approaches, which estimate the policy gradient in the prompt…
In a wide variety of applications, including personalization, we want to measure the difference in outcome due to an intervention and thus have to deal with counterfactual inference. The feedback from a customer in any of these situations…
Contextual linear optimization (CLO) uses predictive contextual features to reduce uncertainty in random cost coefficients in the objective and thereby improve decision-making performance. A canonical example is the stochastic shortest path…
We propose an extensible deep learning method that uses reinforcement learning to train neural networks for offline ranking in information retrieval (IR). We call our method BanditRank as it treats ranking as a contextual bandit problem. In…
We consider the problem of online boosting for regression tasks, when only limited information is available to the learner. We give an efficient regret minimization method that has two implications: an online boosting algorithm with noisy…
Personalization is a crucial aspect of many online experiences. In particular, content ranking is often a key component in delivering sophisticated personalization results. Commonly, supervised learning-to-rank methods are applied, which…
We address a practical problem ubiquitous in modern marketing campaigns, in which a central agent tries to learn a policy for allocating strategic financial incentives to customers and observes only bandit feedback. In contrast to…
In decision-making problems such as the multi-armed bandit, an agent learns sequentially by optimizing a certain feedback. While the mean reward criterion has been extensively studied, other measures that reflect an aversion to adverse…
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 consider a special case of bandit problems, namely batched bandits. Motivated by natural restrictions of recommender systems and e-commerce platforms, we assume that a learning agent observes responses batched in groups over a certain…
We introduce a novel online learning framework that unifies and generalizes pre-established models, such as delayed and corrupted feedback, to encompass adversarial environments where action feedback evolves over time. In this setting, the…
Contextual bandit learning is a reinforcement learning problem where the learner repeatedly receives a set of features (context), takes an action and receives a reward based on the action and context. We consider this problem under a…
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…
A search engine recommends to the user a list of web pages. The user examines this list, from the first page to the last, and clicks on all attractive pages until the user is satisfied. This behavior of the user can be described by the…