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Related papers: Estimation Considerations in Contextual Bandits

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Many works have developed no-regret algorithms for contextual bandits with function approximation, where the mean reward function over context-action pairs belongs to a function class. Although there are many approaches to this problem, one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Aldo Pacchiano

A major research direction in contextual bandits is to develop algorithms that are computationally efficient, yet support flexible, general-purpose function approximation. Algorithms based on modeling rewards have shown strong empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-14 Dylan J. Foster , Claudio Gentile , Mehryar Mohri , Julian Zimmert

Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving real-world decision making problems. In practice, collecting a contextual bandit's feedback from different domains may involve different costs. For example, measuring drug reaction from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Ziyan Wang , Xiaoming Huo , Hao Wang

In this paper, we propose a novel neural exploration strategy in contextual bandits, EE-Net, distinct from the standard UCB-based and TS-based approaches. Contextual multi-armed bandits have been studied for decades with various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-16 Yikun Ban , Yuchen Yan , Arindam Banerjee , Jingrui He

We study bandit model selection in stochastic environments. Our approach relies on a meta-algorithm that selects between candidate base algorithms. We develop a meta-algorithm-base algorithm abstraction that can work with general classes of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Aldo Pacchiano , My Phan , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Anup Rao , Julian Zimmert , Tor Lattimore , Csaba Szepesvari

We study contextual bandits with ancillary constraints on resources, which are common in real-world applications such as choosing ads or dynamic pricing of items. We design the first algorithm for solving these problems that handles…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-08-03 Ashwinkumar Badanidiyuru , John Langford , Aleksandrs Slivkins

Contextual dueling bandit is used to model the bandit problems, where a learner's goal is to find the best arm for a given context using observed noisy human preference feedback over the selected arms for the past contexts. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Arun Verma , Zhongxiang Dai , Xiaoqiang Lin , Patrick Jaillet , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

Multi-armed bandit problems are the most basic examples of sequential decision problems with an exploration-exploitation trade-off. This is the balance between staying with the option that gave highest payoffs in the past and exploring new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-11-06 Sébastien Bubeck , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

Contextual bandits can solve a huge range of real-world problems. However, current popular algorithms to solve them either rely on linear models, or unreliable uncertainty estimation in non-linear models, which are required to deal with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Adam Elwood , Marco Leonardi , Ashraf Mohamed , Alessandro Rozza

We propose a contextual bandit based model to capture the learning and social welfare goals of a web platform in the presence of myopic users. By using payments to incentivize these agents to explore different items/recommendations, we show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-23 Priyank Agrawal , Theja Tulabandhula

We study contextual bandit learning with an abstract policy class and continuous action space. We obtain two qualitatively different regret bounds: one competes with a smoothed version of the policy class under no continuity assumptions,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-23 Akshay Krishnamurthy , John Langford , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Chicheng Zhang

We consider the problem of contextual bandits where actions are subsets of a ground set and mean rewards are modeled by an unknown monotone submodular function that belongs to a class $\mathcal{F}$. We allow time-varying matroid constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Dean P. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin

We consider a novel variant of the contextual bandit problem (i.e., the multi-armed bandit with side-information, or context, available to a decision-maker) where the reward associated with each context-based decision may not always be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-21 Djallel Bouneffouf , Sohini Upadhyay , Yasaman Khazaeni

We study contextual bandits with budget and time constraints, referred to as constrained contextual bandits.The time and budget constraints significantly complicate the exploration and exploitation tradeoff because they introduce complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-10-20 Huasen Wu , R. Srikant , Xin Liu , Chong Jiang

Contextual bandits are widely-used in the study of learning-based control policies for finite action spaces. While the problem is well-studied for bandits with perfectly observed context vectors, little is known about the case of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-03 Hongju Park , Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-08 Xueping Gong , Jiheng Zhang

Bandits with covariates, a.k.a. contextual bandits, address situations where optimal actions (or arms) at a given time $t$, depend on a context $x_t$, e.g., a new patient's medical history, a consumer's past purchases. While it is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-23 Joseph Suk , Samory Kpotufe

We introduce the "inverse bandit" problem of estimating the rewards of a multi-armed bandit instance from observing the learning process of a low-regret demonstrator. Existing approaches to the related problem of inverse reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-23 Wenshuo Guo , Kumar Krishna Agrawal , Aditya Grover , Vidya Muthukumar , Ashwin Pananjady

We study the challenging exploration incentive problem in both bandit and reinforcement learning, where the rewards are scale-free and potentially unbounded, driven by real-world scenarios and differing from existing work. Past works in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Mengfan Xu , Diego Klabjan

In this paper, we address the stochastic contextual linear bandit problem, where a decision maker is provided a context (a random set of actions drawn from a distribution). The expected reward of each action is specified by the inner…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-30 Osama A. Hanna , Lin F. Yang , Christina Fragouli