Related papers: Bernoulli Rank-$1$ Bandits for Click Feedback

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…

The Unbiased Learning-to-Rank framework has been recently proposed as a general approach to systematically remove biases, such as position bias, from learning-to-rank models. The method takes two steps - estimating click propensities and…

Stochastic Rank-One Bandits (Katarya et al, (2017a,b)) are a simple framework for regret minimization problems over rank-one matrices of arms. The initially proposed algorithms are proved to have logarithmic regret, but do not match the…

Online learning to rank (ONL2R) is a foundational problem for recommender systems and has received increasing attention in recent years. Among the existing approaches for ONL2R, a natural modeling architecture is the multi-armed bandit…

Finding an optimal matching in a weighted graph is a standard combinatorial problem. We consider its semi-bandit version where either a pair or a full matching is sampled sequentially. We prove that it is possible to leverage a rank-1…

Typical contextual bandit algorithms assume that the rewards at each round lie in some fixed range $[0, R]$, and their regret scales polynomially with this reward range $R$. However, many practical scenarios naturally involve heavy-tailed…

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…

Estimating position bias is a well-known challenge in Learning to Rank (L2R). Click data in e-commerce applications, such as targeted advertisements and search engines, provides implicit but abundant feedback to improve personalized…

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…

Bandit algorithms are guaranteed to solve diverse sequential decision-making problems, provided that a sufficient exploration budget is available. However, learning from scratch is often too costly for personalization tasks where a single…

In web search and recommendation systems, user clicks are widely used to train ranking models. However, click data is heavily biased, i.e., users tend to click higher-ranked items (position bias), choose only what was shown to them…

In today's technology environment, information is abundant, dynamic, and heterogeneous in nature. Automated filtering and prioritization of information is based on the distinction between whether the information adds substantial value…

Motivated by models of human decision making proposed to explain commonly observed deviations from conventional expected value preferences, we formulate two stochastic multi-armed bandit problems with distorted probabilities on the reward…

Research on the multi-armed bandit problem has studied the trade-off of exploration and exploitation in depth. However, there are numerous applications where the cardinal absolute-valued feedback model (e.g. ratings from one to five) is not…

In this work, we study sequential choice bandits with feedback. We propose bandit algorithms for a platform that personalizes users' experience to maximize its rewards. For each action directed to a given user, the platform is given a…

Cascading bandits have gained popularity in recent years due to their applicability to recommendation systems and online advertising. In the cascading bandit model, at each timestep, an agent recommends an ordered subset of items (called an…

We consider a sequential assortment selection problem where the user choice is given by a multinomial logit (MNL) choice model whose parameters are unknown. In each period, the learning agent observes a $d$-dimensional contextual…

Motivated by a natural problem in online model selection with bandit information, we introduce and analyze a best arm identification problem in the rested bandit setting, wherein arm expected losses decrease with the number of times the arm…

We study the task of maximizing rewards from recommending items (actions) to users sequentially interacting with a recommender system. Users are modeled as latent mixtures of C many representative user classes, where each class specifies a…

Implicit feedback (e.g., clicks, dwell times, etc.) is an abundant source of data in human-interactive systems. While implicit feedback has many advantages (e.g., it is inexpensive to collect, user centric, and timely), its inherent biases…