Related papers: Estimation Considerations in Contextual Bandits
A central problem in sequential decision making is to develop algorithms that are practical and computationally efficient, yet support the use of flexible, general-purpose models. Focusing on the contextual bandit problem, recent progress…
While contextual bandit has a mature theory, effectively leveraging different feedback patterns to enhance the pace of learning remains unclear. Bandits with feedback graphs, which interpolates between the full information and bandit…
The stochastic multi-armed bandit problem is a well-known model for studying the exploration-exploitation trade-off. It has significant possible applications in adaptive clinical trials, which allow for dynamic changes in the treatment…
In this work we consider adversarial contextual bandits with risk constraints. At each round, nature prepares a context, a cost for each arm, and additionally a risk for each arm. The learner leverages the context to pull an arm and then…
We consider a variant of the contextual bandit problem. In standard contextual bandits, when a user arrives we get the user's complete feature vector and then assign a treatment (arm) to that user. In a number of applications (like…
We consider a resource-aware variant of the classical multi-armed bandit problem: In each round, the learner selects an arm and determines a resource limit. It then observes a corresponding (random) reward, provided the (random) amount of…
Over the past decade, contextual bandit algorithms have been gaining in popularity due to their effectiveness and flexibility in solving sequential decision problems---from online advertising and finance to clinical trial design and…
Regret bounds in online learning compare the player's performance to $L^*$, the optimal performance in hindsight with a fixed strategy. Typically such bounds scale with the square root of the time horizon $T$. The more refined concept of…
We initiate the study of learning in contextual bandits with the help of loss predictors. The main question we address is whether one can improve over the minimax regret $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ for learning over $T$ rounds, when the total…
We study the problem of online learning in adversarial bandit problems under a partial observability model called off-policy feedback. In this sequential decision making problem, the learner cannot directly observe its rewards, but instead…
We introduce the factored bandits model, which is a framework for learning with limited (bandit) feedback, where actions can be decomposed into a Cartesian product of atomic actions. Factored bandits incorporate rank-1 bandits as a special…
Contextual bandits with linear payoffs, which are also known as linear bandits, provide a powerful alternative for solving practical problems of sequential decisions, e.g., online advertisements. In the era of big data, contextual data…
The Colonel Blotto game is a renowned resource allocation problem with a long-standing literature in game theory (almost 100 years). However, its scope of application is still restricted by the lack of studies on the incomplete-information…
We introduce a new stochastic smoothing perspective to study adversarial contextual bandit problems. We propose a general algorithm template that represents random perturbation based algorithms and identify several perturbation…
We consider the problem of stochastic $K$-armed dueling bandit in the contextual setting, where at each round the learner is presented with a context set of $K$ items, each represented by a $d$-dimensional feature vector, and the goal of…
Contextual bandit with linear reward functions is among one of the most extensively studied models in bandit and online learning research. Recently, there has been increasing interest in designing \emph{locally private} linear contextual…
We examine a multi-armed bandit problem with contextual information, where the objective is to ensure that each arm receives a minimum aggregated reward across contexts while simultaneously maximizing the total cumulative reward. This…
The deployment of Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) has become commonplace in many economic applications. However, regret guarantees for even state-of-the-art linear bandit algorithms (such as Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty Linear bandit…
We study the problem of using causal models to improve the rate at which good interventions can be learned online in a stochastic environment. Our formalism combines multi-arm bandits and causal inference to model a novel type of bandit…
We study the sequential batch learning problem in linear contextual bandits with finite action sets, where the decision maker is constrained to split incoming individuals into (at most) a fixed number of batches and can only observe…