Related papers: Policy Gradients for Contextual Recommendations
In this work, we introduce the notion of Context-Based Prediction Models. A Context-Based Prediction Model determines the probability of a user's action (such as a click or a conversion) solely by relying on user and contextual features,…
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…
We consider off-policy selection and learning in contextual bandits, where the learner aims to select or train a reward-maximizing policy using data collected by a fixed behavior policy. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we propose a…
Reranking is attracting incremental attention in the recommender systems, which rearranges the input ranking list into the final rank-ing list to better meet user demands. Most existing methods greedily rerank candidates through the rating…
We study the problem of estimating the expected reward of the optimal policy in the stochastic disjoint linear bandit setting. We prove that for certain settings it is possible to obtain an accurate estimate of the optimal policy value even…
Offline policy learning (OPL) leverages existing data collected a priori for policy optimization without any active exploration. Despite the prevalence and recent interest in this problem, its theoretical and algorithmic foundations in…
We study the $K$-armed contextual dueling bandit problem, a sequential decision making setting in which the learner uses contextual information to make two decisions, but only observes \emph{preference-based feedback} suggesting that one…
We address the cold start problem in recommendation systems assuming no contextual information is available neither about users, nor items. We consider the case in which we only have access to a set of ratings of items by users. Most of the…
We study identifying user clusters in contextual multi-armed bandits (MAB). Contextual MAB is an effective tool for many real applications, such as content recommendation and online advertisement. In practice, user dependency plays an…
Online learning algorithms, widely used to power search and content optimization on the web, must balance exploration and exploitation, potentially sacrificing the experience of current users in order to gain information that will lead to…
We introduce in this paper an algorithm named Contextuel-E-Greedy that tackles the dynamicity of the user's content. It is based on dynamic exploration/exploitation tradeoff and can adaptively balance the two aspects by deciding which…
We study online adaptive policy selection in systems with time-varying costs and dynamics. We develop the Gradient-based Adaptive Policy Selection (GAPS) algorithm together with a general analytical framework for online policy selection via…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is an effective paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, existing RLVR methods utilize rollouts in an indiscriminate and short-horizon manner:…
We consider the contextual combinatorial bandit setting where in each round, the learning agent, e.g., a recommender system, selects a subset of "arms," e.g., products, and observes rewards for both the individual base arms, which are a…
Standard approaches to decision-making under uncertainty focus on sequential exploration of the space of decisions. However, \textit{simultaneously} proposing a batch of decisions, which leverages available resources for parallel…
We study the problem of personalized advertisement recommendation (PAR), which consist of a user visiting a system (website) and the system displaying one of $K$ ads to the user. The system uses an internal ad recommendation policy to map…
In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, instance-dependent algorithms attain improved performance on "easy" problems with a gap between the best and second-best arm. Are similar guarantees possible for contextual bandits? While…
In stochastic contextual bandits, an agent sequentially makes actions from a time-dependent action set based on past experience to minimize the cumulative regret. Like many other machine learning algorithms, the performance of bandits…
We introduce a distributionally robust approach that enhances the reliability of offline policy evaluation in contextual bandits under general covariate shifts. Our method aims to deliver robust policy evaluation results in the presence of…
The problem of how to take the right actions to make profits in sequential process continues to be difficult due to the quick dynamics and a significant amount of uncertainty in many application scenarios. In such complicated environments,…