Related papers: Practical Contextual Bandits with Regression Oracl…

The contextual bandit has been identified as a powerful framework to formulate the recommendation process as a sequential decision-making process, where each item is regarded as an arm and the objective is to minimize the regret of $T$…

We study replicable algorithms for stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB) and linear bandits with UCB (Upper Confidence Bound) based exploration. A bandit algorithm is $\rho$-replicable if two executions using shared internal randomness but…

We study the combinatorial semi-bandit problem where an agent selects a subset of base arms and receives individual feedback. While this generalizes the classical multi-armed bandit and has broad applicability, its scalability is limited by…

Solutions to address the periodic review inventory control problem with nonstationary random demand, lost sales, and stochastic vendor lead times typically involve making strong assumptions on the dynamics for either approximation or…

We consider contextual linear bandits over networks, a class of sequential decision-making problems where learning occurs simultaneously across multiple locations and the reward distributions share structural similarities while also…

In many fields such as digital marketing, healthcare, finance, and robotics, it is common to have a well-tested and reliable baseline policy running in production (e.g., a recommender system). Nonetheless, the baseline policy is often…

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,…

We provide the first oracle efficient sublinear regret algorithms for adversarial versions of the contextual bandit problem. In this problem, the learner repeatedly makes an action on the basis of a context and receives reward for the…

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…

We address the problem of learning in an online setting where the learner repeatedly observes features, selects among a set of actions, and receives reward for the action taken. We provide the first efficient algorithm with an optimal…

We consider the stochastic linear (multi-armed) contextual bandit problem with the possibility of hidden simple multi-armed bandit structure in which the rewards are independent of the contextual information. Algorithms that are designed…

We propose an estimator and confidence interval for computing the value of a policy from off-policy data in the contextual bandit setting. To this end we apply empirical likelihood techniques to formulate our estimator and confidence…

We tackle the problem of online reward maximisation over a large finite set of actions described by their contexts. We focus on the case when the number of actions is too big to sample all of them even once. However we assume that we have…

Many efficient algorithms with strong theoretical guarantees have been proposed for the contextual multi-armed bandit problem. However, applying these algorithms in practice can be difficult because they require domain expertise to build…

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…

Contextual bandits are a form of multi-armed bandit in which the agent has access to predictive side information (known as the context) for each arm at each time step, and have been used to model personalized news recommendation, ad…

In this paper, we tackle the computational efficiency of kernelized UCB algorithms in contextual bandits. While standard methods require a O(CT^3) complexity where T is the horizon and the constant C is related to optimizing the UCB rule,…

In decision-making problems such as the multi-armed bandit, an agent learns sequentially by optimizing a certain feedback. While the mean reward criterion has been extensively studied, other measures that reflect an aversion to adverse…

Motivated by problems of learning to rank long item sequences, we introduce a variant of the cascading bandit model that considers flexible length sequences with varying rewards and losses. We formulate two generative models for this…

Standard contextual bandit problem assumes that all the relevant contexts are observed before the algorithm chooses an arm. This modeling paradigm, while useful, often falls short when dealing with problems in which valuable additional…