Related papers: Policy Gradients for Contextual Recommendations
Context-Based Information Retrieval is recently modelled as an exploration/ exploitation trade-off (exr/exp) problem, where the system has to choose between maximizing its expected rewards dealing with its current knowledge (exploitation)…
Conversational contextual bandits elicit user preferences by occasionally querying for explicit feedback on key-terms to accelerate learning. However, there are aspects of existing approaches which limit their performance. First,…
Contextual bandit algorithms often estimate reward models to inform decision-making. However, true rewards can contain action-independent redundancies that are not relevant for decision-making. We show it is more data-efficient to estimate…
Taking advantage of contextual information can potentially boost the performance of recommender systems. In the era of big data, such side information often has several dimensions. Thus, developing decision-making algorithms to cope with…
We study the linear contextual bandit problem where an agent has to select one candidate from a pool and each candidate belongs to a sensitive group. In this setting, candidates' rewards may not be directly comparable between groups, for…
Recent work shows that when contexts are drawn i.i.d., linear contextual bandits can be reduced to single-context linear bandits. This ``contexts are cheap" perspective is highly advantageous, as it allows for sharper finite-time analyses…
Focusing on Random Forests, we propose a multi-armed contextual bandit recommendation framework for feature-based selection of a single shallow tree of the learned ensemble. The trained system, which works on top of the Random Forest,…
Equitably allocating limited resources in high-stakes domains-such as education, employment, and healthcare-requires balancing short-term utility with long-term impact, while accounting for delayed outcomes, hidden heterogeneity, and…
The contextual bandit problem, which is a type of reinforcement learning tasks, provides an effective framework for solving challenges in recommendation systems, such as satisfying real-time requirements, enabling personalization,…
We consider the problem of model selection for the general stochastic contextual bandits under the realizability assumption. We propose a successive refinement based algorithm called Adaptive Contextual Bandit ({\ttfamily ACB}), that works…
Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning are a successful approach for a variety of reasons: they are model free, they directly optimize the performance metric of interest, and they allow for richly parameterized policies.…
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit diverse response behaviors, costs, and strengths, making it challenging to select the most suitable LLM for a given user query. We study the problem of adaptive multi-LLM selection in an online setting,…
Classical policy gradient (PG) methods in reinforcement learning frequently converge to suboptimal local optima, a challenge exacerbated in large or complex environments. This work investigates Policy Gradient with Tree Search (PGTS), an…
Personalization enables businesses to learn customer preferences from past interactions and thus to target individual customers with more relevant content. We consider the problem of predicting the optimal promotional offer for a given…
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,…
The matrix contextual bandit (CB), as an extension of the well-known multi-armed bandit, is a powerful framework that has been widely applied in sequential decision-making scenarios involving low-rank structure. In many real-world…
Contextual bandits with average-case statistical guarantees are inadequate in risk-averse situations because they might trade off degraded worst-case behaviour for better average performance. Designing a risk-averse contextual bandit is…
Recommender systems relying on contextual multi-armed bandits continuously improve relevant item recommendations by taking into account the contextual information. The objective of bandit algorithms is to learn the best arm (e.g., best item…
Thanks to the power of representation learning, neural contextual bandit algorithms demonstrate remarkable performance improvement against their classical counterparts. But because their exploration has to be performed in the entire neural…
Contextual bandit algorithms are at the core of many applications, including recommender systems, clinical trials, and optimal portfolio selection. One of the most popular problems studied in the contextual bandit literature is to maximize…