Related papers: Contextual bandits with surrogate losses: Margin b…
We present efficient algorithms for the problem of contextual bandits with i.i.d. covariates, an arbitrary sequence of rewards, and an arbitrary class of policies. Our algorithm BISTRO requires d calls to the empirical risk minimization…
Linear contextual bandit is a popular online learning problem. It has been mostly studied in centralized learning settings. With the surging demand of large-scale decentralized model learning, e.g., federated learning, how to retain regret…
We study finite-armed stochastic bandits where the rewards of each arm might be correlated to those of other arms. We introduce a novel phased algorithm that exploits the given structure to build confidence sets over the parameters of the…
This paper studies bandit problems where an agent has access to offline data that might be utilized to potentially improve the estimation of each arm's reward distribution. A major obstacle in this setting is the existence of compound…
The growing interest in complex decision-making and language modeling problems highlights the importance of sample-efficient learning over very long horizons. This work takes a step in this direction by investigating contextual linear…
Stochastic linear bandits are a fundamental model for sequential decision making, where an agent selects a vector-valued action and receives a noisy reward with expected value given by an unknown linear function. Although well studied in…
The problem of bipartite ranking, where instances are labeled positive or negative and the goal is to learn a scoring function that minimizes the probability of mis-ranking a pair of positive and negative instances (or equivalently, that…
In order to make good decision under uncertainty an agent must learn from observations. To do so, two of the most common frameworks are Contextual Bandits and Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In this paper, we study whether there exist…
We present a new algorithm based on posterior sampling for learning in constrained Markov decision processes (CMDP) in the infinite-horizon undiscounted setting. The algorithm achieves near-optimal regret bounds while being advantageous…
Contextual multinomial logit (MNL) bandits capture many real-world assortment recommendation problems such as online retailing/advertising. However, prior work has only considered (generalized) linear value functions, which greatly limits…
In this work, we develop linear bandit algorithms that automatically adapt to different environments. By plugging a novel loss estimator into the optimization problem that characterizes the instance-optimal strategy, our first algorithm not…
This paper studies the adversarial graphical contextual bandits, a variant of adversarial multi-armed bandits that leverage two categories of the most common side information: \emph{contexts} and \emph{side observations}. In this setting, a…
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 consider the stochastic linear contextual bandit problem with high-dimensional features. We analyze the Thompson sampling algorithm using special classes of sparsity-inducing priors (e.g., spike-and-slab) to model the unknown parameter…
We study a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, where at each time step, the player observes an independently sampled context that determines the arms' mean rewards. However, playing an arm blocks it (across all contexts) for a…
Online learning methods yield sequential regret bounds under minimal assumptions and provide in-expectation risk bounds for statistical learning. However, despite the apparent advantage of online guarantees over their statistical…
Recent works have shown a reduction from contextual bandits to online regression under a realizability assumption [Foster and Rakhlin, 2020, Foster and Krishnamurthy, 2021]. In this work, we investigate the use of neural networks for such…
Restless bandit problems assume time-varying reward distributions of the arms, which adds flexibility to the model but makes the analysis more challenging. We study learning algorithms over the unknown reward distributions and prove a…
We study the sequential general online regression, known also as the sequential probability assignments, under logarithmic loss when compared against a broad class of experts. We focus on obtaining tight, often matching, lower and upper…
Consider the sequential optimization of an expensive to evaluate and possibly non-convex objective function $f$ from noisy feedback, that can be considered as a continuum-armed bandit problem. Upper bounds on the regret performance of…