Related papers: Bayesian Unification of Gradient and Bandit-based …
Offline policy learning (OPL) leverages existing data collected a priori for policy optimization without any active exploration. Despite the prevalence and recent interest in this problem, its theoretical and algorithmic foundations in…
Gradient-based optimization drives the unprecedented performance of modern deep neural network models across diverse applications. Adaptive algorithms have accelerated neural network training due to their rapid convergence rates; however,…
Optimization is commonly employed to determine the content of web pages, such as to maximize conversions on landing pages or click-through rates on search engine result pages. Often the layout of these pages can be decoupled into several…
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…
In this paper we present a new algorithm for online (sequential) inference in Bayesian neural networks, and show its suitability for tackling contextual bandit problems. The key idea is to combine the extended Kalman filter (which locally…
The present paper deals with online convex optimization involving both time-varying loss functions, and time-varying constraints. The loss functions are not fully accessible to the learner, and instead only the function values (a.k.a.…
Gradient tracking methods have emerged as one of the most popular approaches for solving decentralized optimization problems over networks. In this setting, each node in the network has a portion of the global objective function, and the…
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…
Fully Bayesian approaches to sequential decision-making assume that problem parameters are generated from a known prior. In practice, such information is often lacking. This problem is exacerbated in setups with partial information, where a…
Adam is a widely used optimizer in neural network training due to its adaptive learning rate. However, because different data samples influence model updates to varying degrees, treating them equally can lead to inefficient convergence. To…
Online model selection in Bayesian bandits raises a fundamental exploration challenge: When an environment instance is sampled from a prior distribution, how can we design an adaptive strategy that explores multiple bandit learners and…
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…
Bayesian optimization is normally performed within fixed variable bounds. In cases like hyperparameter tuning for machine learning algorithms, setting the variable bounds is not trivial. It is hard to guarantee that any fixed bounds will…
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…
In a typical stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, the objective is often to maximize the expected sum of rewards over some time horizon $T$. While the choice of a strategy that accomplishes that is optimal with no additional information,…
The Gaussian process bandit is a problem in which we want to find a maximizer of a black-box function with the minimum number of function evaluations. If the black-box function varies with time, then time-varying Bayesian optimization is a…
We consider an online decision making setting known as contextual bandit problem, and propose an approach for improving contextual bandit performance by using an adaptive feature extraction (representation learning) based on online…
Several sparsity-constrained algorithms such as Orthogonal Matching Pursuit or the Frank-Wolfe algorithm with sparsity constraints work by iteratively selecting a novel atom to add to the current non-zero set of variables. This selection…
We study how representation learning can improve the learning efficiency of contextual bandit problems. We study the setting where we play T contextual linear bandits with dimension d simultaneously, and these T bandit tasks collectively…
This paper introduces a new principled approach for off-policy learning in contextual bandits. Unlike previous work, our approach does not derive learning principles from intractable or loose bounds. We analyse the problem through the…