English
Related papers

Related papers: Random Forest for the Contextual Bandit Problem - …

200 papers

In this paper we adapt the nearest neighbour rule to the contextual bandit problem. Our algorithm handles the fully adversarial setting in which no assumptions at all are made about the data-generation process. When combined with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-11 Stephen Pasteris , Chris Hicks , Vasilios Mavroudis

Stochastic linear contextual bandit algorithms have substantial applications in practice, such as recommender systems, online advertising, clinical trials, etc. Recent works show that optimal bandit algorithms are vulnerable to adversarial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-31 Qin Ding , Cho-Jui Hsieh , James Sharpnack

Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-18 Maria Dimakopoulou , Zhengyuan Zhou , Susan Athey , Guido Imbens

Motivated by problems of learning to rank long item sequences, we introduce a variant of the cascading bandit model that considers flexible length sequences with varying rewards and losses. We formulate two generative models for this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-05 Anirban Santara , Claudio Gentile , Gaurav Aggarwal , Shuai Li

Contextual bandit algorithms are commonly used in digital health to recommend personalized treatments. However, to ensure the effectiveness of the treatments, patients are often requested to take actions that have no immediate benefit to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Kyra Gan , Esmaeil Keyvanshokooh , Xueqing Liu , Susan Murphy

We consider the contextual bandit problem, where a player sequentially makes decisions based on past observations to maximize the cumulative reward. Although many algorithms have been proposed for contextual bandit, most of them rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Qin Ding , Cho-Jui Hsieh , James Sharpnack

In a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, an online algorithm makes a sequence of choices. In each round it chooses from a time-invariant set of alternatives and receives the payoff associated with this alternative. While the case of small…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2014-05-21 Aleksandrs Slivkins

We consider the contextual bandit problem where at each time, the agent only has access to a noisy version of the context and the error variance (or an estimator of this variance). This setting is motivated by a wide range of applications…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-19 Yongyi Guo , Ziping Xu , Susan Murphy

Personalized web services strive to adapt their services (advertisements, news articles, etc) to individual users by making use of both content and user information. Despite a few recent advances, this problem remains challenging for at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-05 Lihong Li , Wei Chu , John Langford , Robert E. Schapire

Contextual bandit algorithms are at the core of many applications, including recommender systems, clinical trials, and optimal portfolio selection. One of the most popular problems studied in the contextual bandit literature is to maximize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Siddhant Chaudhary , Abhishek Sinha

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-02-20 Ananda Narayanan B , Balaraman Ravindran

Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits is a well-known and accepted online optimization algorithm, that is used in many Web experiences to tailor content or presentation to users' traffic. Much has been published on theoretical guarantees (e.g.…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-07-12 David Abensur , Ivan Balashov , Shaked Bar , Ronny Lempel , Nurit Moscovici , Ilan Orlov , Danny Rosenstein , Ido Tamir

In this paper we consider the problem of online stochastic optimization of a locally smooth function under bandit feedback. We introduce the high-confidence tree (HCT) algorithm, a novel any-time $\mathcal{X}$-armed bandit algorithm, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-05-20 Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar , Alessandro Lazaric , Emma Brunskill

Contextual bandit algorithms are extremely popular and widely used in recommendation systems to provide online personalised recommendations. A recurrent assumption is the stationarity of the reward function, which is rather unrealistic in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-04-29 Giuseppe Di Benedetto , Vito Bellini , Giovanni Zappella

A key goal in stochastic contextual linear bandits is to efficiently learn a near-optimal policy. Prior algorithms for this problem learn a policy by strategically sampling actions but naively (passively) sampling contexts from the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Emma Brunskill , Ishani Karmarkar , Zhaoqi Li

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly popular, there is a growing need to predict which out of a set of LLMs will yield a successful answer to a given query at low cost. This problem promises to become even more relevant as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Baran Atalar , Eddie Zhang , Carlee Joe-Wong

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit diverse response behaviors, costs, and strengths, making it challenging to select the most suitable LLM for a given user query. We study the problem of adaptive multi-LLM selection in an online setting,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Manhin Poon , XiangXiang Dai , Xutong Liu , Fang Kong , John C. S. Lui , Jinhang Zuo

We study contextual bandits in the presence of a stage-wise constraint when the constraint must be satisfied both with high probability and in expectation. We start with the linear case where both the reward function and the stage-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Aldo Pacchiano , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Peter Bartlett

Contextual bandits are widely used in industrial personalization systems. These online learning frameworks learn a treatment assignment policy in the presence of treatment effects that vary with the observed contextual features of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-11 Claudia Roberts , Maria Dimakopoulou , Qifeng Qiao , Ashok Chandrashekhar , Tony Jebara

In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, instance-dependent algorithms attain improved performance on "easy" problems with a gap between the best and second-best arm. Are similar guarantees possible for contextual bandits? While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin , David Simchi-Levi , Yunzong Xu