Related papers: Efficient Contextual Bandits in Non-stationary Wor…
We study best-of-both-worlds algorithms for $K$-armed linear contextual bandits. Our algorithms deliver near-optimal regret bounds in both the adversarial and stochastic regimes, without prior knowledge about the environment. In the…
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…
We study a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, where at each time step, the player observes an independently sampled context that determines the arms' mean rewards. However, playing an arm blocks it (across all contexts) for a…
We consider the stochastic bandit problem in the sublinear space setting, where one cannot record the win-loss record for all $K$ arms. We give an algorithm using $O(1)$ words of space with regret \[ \sum_{i=1}^{K}\frac{1}{\Delta_i}\log…
We address the problem of learning in an online setting where the learner repeatedly observes features, selects among a set of actions, and receives reward for the action taken. We provide the first efficient algorithm with an optimal…
We consider the stochastic contextual bandit problem with additional regularization. The motivation comes from problems where the policy of the agent must be close to some baseline policy which is known to perform well on the task. To…
We consider the neural contextual bandit problem. In contrast to the existing work which primarily focuses on ReLU neural nets, we consider a general set of smooth activation functions. Under this more general setting, (i) we derive…
We consider a non-stationary formulation of the stochastic multi-armed bandit where the rewards are no longer assumed to be identically distributed. For the best-arm identification task, we introduce a version of Successive Elimination…
Restless bandit problems are instances of non-stationary multi-armed bandits. These problems have been studied well from the optimization perspective, where the goal is to efficiently find a near-optimal policy when system parameters are…
Multi-dimensional online decision making plays a crucial role in many real applications such as online recommendation and digital marketing. In these problems, a decision at each time is a combination of choices from different types of…
This work studies linear bandits under a new notion of gap-adjusted misspecification and is an extension of Liu et al. (2023). When the underlying reward function is not linear, existing linear bandits work usually relies on a uniform…
Past research on interactive decision making problems (bandits, reinforcement learning, etc.) mostly focuses on the minimax regret that measures the algorithm's performance on the hardest instance. However, an ideal algorithm should adapt…
In this paper we initiate a study of non parametric contextual bandits under shape constraints on the mean reward function. Specifically, we study a setting where the context is one dimensional, and the mean reward function is isotonic with…
The multi-armed bandits' framework is the most common platform to study strategies for sequential decision-making problems. Recently, the notion of fairness has attracted a lot of attention in the machine learning community. One can impose…
We investigate the non-stationary stochastic linear bandit problem where the reward distribution evolves each round. Existing algorithms characterize the non-stationarity by the total variation budget $B_K$, which is the summation of the…
We consider nonstationary multi-armed bandit problems where the model parameters of the arms change over time. We introduce the adaptive resetting bandit (ADR-bandit), a bandit algorithm class that leverages adaptive windowing techniques…
We study the optimal batch-regret tradeoff for batch linear contextual bandits. For any batch number $M$, number of actions $K$, time horizon $T$, and dimension $d$, we provide an algorithm and prove its regret guarantee, which, due to…
Contextual bandits are a central framework for sequential decision-making, with applications ranging from recommendation systems to clinical trials. While nonparametric methods can flexibly model complex reward structures, they suffer from…
An agent in a nonstationary contextual bandit problem should balance between exploration and the exploitation of (periodic or structured) patterns present in its previous experiences. Handcrafting an appropriate historical context is an…
Contextual bandits are canonical models for sequential decision-making under uncertainty in environments with time-varying components. In this setting, the expected reward of each bandit arm consists of the inner product of an unknown…