Related papers: StreamingBandit; Experimenting with Bandit Policie…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) aims to estimate the performance of hypothetical policies using data generated by a different policy. Because of its huge potential impact in practice, there has been growing research interest in this field.…
Bandit algorithms and Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools in artificial intelligence, each addressing distinct yet complementary challenges in decision-making and natural language processing. This survey explores the…
This thesis considers sequential decision problems, where the loss/reward incurred by selecting an action may not be inferred from observed feedback. A major part of this thesis focuses on the unsupervised sequential selection problem,…
Users of recommender systems often behave in a non-stationary fashion, due to their evolving preferences and tastes over time. In this work, we propose a practical approach for fast personalization to non-stationary users. The key idea is…
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…
Digital educational technologies offer the potential to customize students' experiences and learn what works for which students, enhancing the technology as more students interact with it. We consider whether and when attempting to discover…
Equitably allocating limited resources in high-stakes domains-such as education, employment, and healthcare-requires balancing short-term utility with long-term impact, while accounting for delayed outcomes, hidden heterogeneity, and…
Ranking system is the core part of modern retrieval and recommender systems, where the goal is to rank candidate items given user contexts. Optimizing ranking systems online means that the deployed system can serve user requests, e.g.,…
We explore the promises and challenges of employing sequential decision-making algorithms -- such as bandits, reinforcement learning, and active learning -- in law and public policy. While such algorithms have well-characterized performance…
Live streaming platforms require real-time monitoring and reaction to social signals, utilizing partial and asynchronous evidence from video, text, and audio. We propose StreamSense, a streaming detector that couples a lightweight streaming…
The early sections of this paper present an analysis of a Markov decision model that is known as the multi-armed bandit under the assumption that the utility function of the decision maker is either linear or exponential. The analysis…
Contextual bandits are online learners that, given an input, select an arm and receive a reward for that arm. They use the reward as a learning signal and aim to maximize the total reward over the inputs. Contextual bandits are commonly…
Motivated by the observation that overexposure to unwanted marketing activities leads to customer dissatisfaction, we consider a setting where a platform offers a sequence of messages to its users and is penalized when users abandon the…
A key feature of sequential decision making under uncertainty is a need to balance between exploiting--choosing the best action according to the current knowledge, and exploring--obtaining information about values of other actions. The…
The rapid advancement in large language models (LLMs) has brought forth a diverse range of models with varying capabilities that excel in different tasks and domains. However, selecting the optimal LLM for user queries often involves a…
In multi-server queueing systems where there is no central queue holding all incoming jobs, job dispatching policies are used to assign incoming jobs to the queue at one of the servers. Classic job dispatching policies such as…
This paper introduces a novel multi-armed bandits framework, termed Contextual Restless Bandits (CRB), for complex online decision-making. This CRB framework incorporates the core features of contextual bandits and restless bandits, so that…
We investigate streaming over multiple links. A file is split into small units called chunks that may be requested on the various links according to some policy, and received after some random delay. After a start-up time called…
Swim extends the actor model to support applications composed of linked distributed actors that continuously analyze boundless streams of events from millions of sources, to respond in-sync with the real-world. Swim builds a running…
Although many algorithms for the multi-armed bandit problem are well-understood theoretically, empirical confirmation of their effectiveness is generally scarce. This paper presents a thorough empirical study of the most popular multi-armed…