Related papers: Robust Contextual Bandit via the Capped-$\ell_{2}$…
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 bandits serve as a fundamental model for many sequential decision making tasks. The most popular theoretically justified approaches are based on the optimism principle. While these algorithms can be practical, they are known to…
In recommender system or crowdsourcing applications of online learning, a human's preferences or abilities are often a function of the algorithm's recent actions. Motivated by this, a significant line of work has formalized settings where…
This paper addresses the poor finite-horizon performance of existing online \emph{restless bandit} (RB) algorithms, which stems from the prohibitive sample complexity of learning a full \emph{Markov decision process} (MDP) for each agent.…
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…
Contextual Bandits find important use cases in various real-life scenarios such as online advertising, recommendation systems, healthcare, etc. However, most of the algorithms use flat feature vectors to represent context whereas, in the…
We study the robustness properties of $\ell_1$ norm minimization for the classical linear regression problem with a given design matrix and contamination restricted to the dependent variable. We perform a fine error analysis of the $\ell_1$…
We consider a novel formulation of the multi-armed bandit model, which we call the contextual bandit with restricted context, where only a limited number of features can be accessed by the learner at every iteration. This novel formulation…
This paper introduces a novel multi-armed bandits framework, termed Contextual Restless Bandits (CRB), for complex online decision-making. This CRB framework incorporates the core features of contextual bandits and restless bandits, so that…
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…
Contextual bandit algorithms have become popular for online recommendation systems such as Digg, Yahoo! Buzz, and news recommendation in general. \emph{Offline} evaluation of the effectiveness of new algorithms in these applications is…
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…
In the contextual linear bandit setting, algorithms built on the optimism principle fail to exploit the structure of the problem and have been shown to be asymptotically suboptimal. In this paper, we follow recent approaches of deriving…
This study introduces an outlier-robust model for analyzing hierarchically structured bounded count data within a Bayesian framework, utilizing a logistic regression approach implemented in JAGS. Our model incorporates a t-distributed…
In epidemic modeling, outliers can distort parameter estimation and ultimately lead to misguided public health decisions. Although there are existing robust methods that can mitigate this distortion, the ability to simultaneously detect…
Conservative Contextual Bandits (CCBs) address safety in sequential decision making by requiring that an agent's policy, along with minimizing regret, also satisfies a safety constraint: the performance is not worse than a baseline policy…
In many machine learning tasks, a common approach for dealing with large-scale data is to build a small summary, {\em e.g.,} coreset, that can efficiently represent the original input. However, real-world datasets usually contain outliers…
Motivated by online recommendation systems, we propose the problem of finding the optimal policy in multitask contextual bandits when a small fraction $\alpha < 1/2$ of tasks (users) are arbitrary and adversarial. The remaining fraction of…
Despite the significant interest and progress in reinforcement learning (RL) problems with adversarial corruption, current works are either confined to the linear setting or lead to an undesired $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T}\zeta)$ regret bound,…
Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits is crucial for assessing new policies using existing data without costly experimentation. However, current OPE methods, such as Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) and Doubly Robust (DR)…