Related papers: A Contextual Bandit Approach for Stream-Based Acti…

Contextual multinomial logit (MNL) bandits capture many real-world assortment recommendation problems such as online retailing/advertising. However, prior work has only considered (generalized) linear value functions, which greatly limits…

In this paper we propose the multi-objective contextual bandit problem with similarity information. This problem extends the classical contextual bandit problem with similarity information by introducing multiple and possibly conflicting…

Personalized recommendations for new users, also known as the cold-start problem, can be formulated as a contextual bandit problem. Existing contextual bandit algorithms generally rely on features alone to capture user variability. Such…

We study both stream-based and pool-based active learning with neural network approximations. A recent line of works proposed bandit-based approaches that transformed active learning into a bandit problem, achieving both theoretical and…

We study the fundamental limits of learning in contextual bandits, where a learner's rewards depend on their actions and a known context, which extends the canonical multi-armed bandit to the case where side-information is available. We are…

Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…

Many sequential decision-making problems in communication networks can be modeled as contextual bandit problems, which are natural extensions of the well-known multi-armed bandit problem. In contextual bandit problems, at each time, an…

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 study nonparametric contextual bandits under batch constraints, where the expected reward for each action is modeled as a smooth function of covariates, and the policy updates are made at the end of each batch of observations. We…

Contextual bandit is a general framework for online learning in sequential decision-making problems that has found application in a wide range of domains, including recommendation systems, online advertising, and clinical trials. A critical…

We address the problem of learning in an online, bandit setting where the learner must repeatedly select among $K$ actions, but only receives partial feedback based on its choices. We establish two new facts: First, using a new algorithm…

Contextual bandit algorithms often estimate reward models to inform decision-making. However, true rewards can contain action-independent redundancies that are not relevant for decision-making. We show it is more data-efficient to estimate…

In high-stakes AI applications, even a single action can cause irreparable damage. However, nearly all of sequential decision-making theory assumes that all errors are recoverable (e.g., by bounding rewards). Standard bandit algorithms that…

The contextual bandit problem is a theoretically justified framework with wide applications in various fields. While the previous study on this problem usually requires independence between noise and contexts, our work considers a more…

Contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms have been shown promising for maximizing cumulative rewards in sequential decision tasks such as news article recommendation systems, web page ad placement algorithms, and mobile health.…

For infinite action contextual bandits, smoothed regret and reduction to regression results in state-of-the-art online performance with computational cost independent of the action set: unfortunately, the resulting data exhaust does not…

Contextual bandits are incredibly useful in many practical problems. We go one step further by devising a more realistic problem that combines: (1) contextual bandits with dense arm features, (2) non-linear reward functions, and (3) a…

Modern systems, such as digital platforms and service systems, increasingly rely on contextual bandits for online decision-making; however, their deployment can inadvertently create unfair exposure among arms, undermining long-term platform…

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.…

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…