Related papers: MNL-Bandit: A Dynamic Learning Approach to Assortm…
Most recommender systems recommend a list of items. The user examines the list, from the first item to the last, and often chooses the first attractive item and does not examine the rest. This type of user behavior can be modeled by the…
The contextual bandit has been identified as a powerful framework to formulate the recommendation process as a sequential decision-making process, where each item is regarded as an arm and the objective is to minimize the regret of $T$…
Multi-armed bandit problems are the predominant theoretical model of exploration-exploitation tradeoffs in learning, and they have countless applications ranging from medical trials, to communication networks, to Web search and advertising.…
With the transition from people's traditional `brick-and-mortar' shopping to online mobile shopping patterns in web 2.0 $\mathit{era}$, the recommender system plays a critical role in E-Commerce and E-Retails. This is especially true when…
We study the problem of optimizing assortment decisions in the presence of product-specific costs when customers choose according to a multinomial logit model. This problem is NP-hard and approximate solutions methods have been proposed in…
We study a variant of the thresholding bandit problem (TBP) in the context of outlier detection, where the objective is to identify the outliers whose rewards are above a threshold. Distinct from the traditional TBP, the threshold is…
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…
A natural optimization model that formulates many online resource allocation and revenue management problems is the online linear program (LP) in which the constraint matrix is revealed column by column along with the corresponding…
Sequential decision making under uncertainty is studied in a mixed observability domain. The goal is to maximize the amount of information obtained on a partially observable stochastic process under constraints imposed by a fully observable…
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…
We consider an assortment selection and pricing problem in which a seller has $N$ different items available for sale. In each round, the seller observes a $d$-dimensional contextual preference information vector for the user, and offers to…
Maximizing long-term rewards is the primary goal in sequential decision-making problems. The majority of existing methods assume that side information is freely available, enabling the learning agent to observe all features' states before…
An opaque product is a product for which only partial information is disclosed to the buyer at the time of purchase. Opaque products are common in sectors such as travel and online retail, where the car type or product color is hidden in…
In many sequential decision-making problems, the goal is to optimize a utility function while satisfying a set of constraints on different utilities. This learning problem is formalized through Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs).…
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…
Increasingly, recommender systems are tasked with improving users' long-term satisfaction. In this context, we study a content exploration task, which we formalize as a bandit problem with delayed rewards. There is an apparent trade-off in…
In this paper we consider the problem of learning the optimal policy for uncontrolled restless bandit problems. In an uncontrolled restless bandit problem, there is a finite set of arms, each of which when pulled yields a positive reward.…
This paper studies a bandit optimization problem where the goal is to maximize a function $f(x)$ over $T$ periods for some unknown strongly concave function $f$. We consider a new pairwise comparison oracle, where the decision-maker chooses…
Contextual bandits provide an effective way to model the dynamic data problem in ML by leveraging online (incremental) learning to continuously adjust the predictions based on changing environment. We explore details on contextual bandits,…
Exploration policies in Bayesian bandits maximize the average reward over problem instances drawn from some distribution $\mathcal{P}$. In this work, we learn such policies for an unknown distribution $\mathcal{P}$ using samples from…