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Related papers: Policy Gradients for Contextual Recommendations

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We present a new recommendation setting for picking out two items from a given set to be highlighted to a user, based on contextual input. These two items are presented to a user who chooses one of them, possibly stochastically, with a bias…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-01-26 Daniel Barsky , Koby Crammer

Contextual bandits have become an increasingly popular solution for personalized recommender systems. Despite their growing use, the interpretability of these systems remains a significant challenge, particularly for the often non-expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Andrew Maher , Matia Gobbo , Lancelot Lachartre , Subash Prabanantham , Rowan Swiers , Puli Liyanagama

Efficient online decision-making in contextual bandits is challenging, as methods without informative priors often suffer from computational or statistical inefficiencies. In this work, we leverage pre-trained diffusion models as expressive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Imad Aouali

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

This work explores adaptations of successful multi-armed bandits policies to the online contextual bandits scenario with binary rewards using binary classification algorithms such as logistic regression as black-box oracles. Some of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 David Cortes

Contextual bandit algorithms are ubiquitous tools for active sequential experimentation in healthcare and the tech industry. They involve online learning algorithms that adaptively learn policies over time to map observed contexts $X_t$ to…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-08-19 Ian Waudby-Smith , Lili Wu , Aaditya Ramdas , Nikos Karampatziakis , Paul Mineiro

In the stochastic contextual bandit setting, regret-minimizing algorithms have been extensively researched, but their instance-minimizing best-arm identification counterparts remain seldom studied. In this work, we focus on the stochastic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-04 Zhaoqi Li , Lillian Ratliff , Houssam Nassif , Kevin Jamieson , Lalit Jain

Conversational recommendation systems elicit user preferences by interacting with users to obtain their feedback on recommended commodities. Such systems utilize a multi-armed bandit framework to learn user preferences in an online manner…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-29 Shuhua Yang , Hui Yuan , Xiaoying Zhang , Mengdi Wang , Hong Zhang , Huazheng Wang

Contextual bandit learning is an increasingly popular approach to optimizing recommender systems via user feedback, but can be slow to converge in practice due to the need for exploring a large feature space. In this paper, we propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-03 Yisong Yue , Sue Ann Hong , Carlos Guestrin

We propose a contextual-bandit approach for demand side management by offering price incentives. More precisely, a target mean consumption is set at each round and the mean consumption is modeled as a complex function of the distribution of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-14 Margaux Brégère , Pierre Gaillard , Yannig Goude , Gilles Stoltz

We study off-policy learning (OPL) in contextual bandits, which plays a key role in a wide range of real-world applications such as recommendation systems and online advertising. Typical OPL in contextual bandits assumes an unconstrained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Koichi Tanaka , Ren Kishimoto , Bushun Kawagishi , Yusuke Narita , Yasuo Yamamoto , Nobuyuki Shimizu , Yuta Saito

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 context used at each decision may be corrupted ("useless context"). This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Djallel Bouneffouf

With the fast development of big data, learning the optimal decision rule by recursively updating it and making online decisions has been easier than before. We study the online statistical inference of model parameters in a contextual…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-22 Xiangyu Chang , Xi Chen , Zehua Lai , He Li , Zhihong Liu , Yichen Zhang

Contextual Bandits is one of the widely popular techniques used in applications such as personalization, recommendation systems, mobile health, causal marketing etc . As a dynamic approach, it can be more efficient than standard A/B testing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Praneet Dutta , Joe Cheuk , Jonathan S Kim , Massimo Mascaro

In the classical contextual bandits problem, in each round $t$, a learner observes some context $c$, chooses some action $i$ to perform, and receives some reward $r_{i,t}(c)$. We consider the variant of this problem where in addition to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-17 Santiago Balseiro , Negin Golrezaei , Mohammad Mahdian , Vahab Mirrokni , Jon Schneider

In this paper, we study the non-asymptotic sample complexity for the pure exploration problem in contextual bandits and tabular reinforcement learning (RL): identifying an epsilon-optimal policy from a set of policies with high probability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Adhyyan Narang , Andrew Wagenmaker , Lillian Ratliff , Kevin Jamieson

In today's technology environment, information is abundant, dynamic, and heterogeneous in nature. Automated filtering and prioritization of information is based on the distinction between whether the information adds substantial value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Jade Freeman , Michael Rawson

We study policy gradient (PG) for reinforcement learning in continuous time and space under the regularized exploratory formulation developed by Wang et al. (2020). We represent the gradient of the value function with respect to a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Yanwei Jia , Xun Yu Zhou

Delivering treatment recommendations via pervasive electronic devices such as mobile phones has the potential to be a viable and scalable treatment medium for long-term health behavior management. But active experimentation of treatment…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-08-24 Mawulolo K. Ameko , Miranda L. Beltzer , Lihua Cai , Mehdi Boukhechba , Bethany A. Teachman , Laura E. Barnes

Tractable contextual bandit algorithms often rely on the realizability assumption - i.e., that the true expected reward model belongs to a known class, such as linear functions. In this work, we present a tractable bandit algorithm that is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Vitor Hadad , Susan Athey