Related papers: Contextual bandits with surrogate losses: Margin b…

We present surrogate regret bounds for arbitrary surrogate losses in the context of binary classification with label-dependent costs. Such bounds relate a classifier's risk, assessed with respect to a surrogate loss, to its cost-sensitive…

We study contextual bandit learning with an abstract policy class and continuous action space. We obtain two qualitatively different regret bounds: one competes with a smoothed version of the policy class under no continuity assumptions,…

In this work, we study the performance of the Thompson Sampling algorithm for Contextual Bandit problems based on the framework introduced by Neu et al. and their concept of lifted information ratio. First, we prove a comprehensive bound on…

We propose a simple model selection approach for algorithms in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. As opposed to prior work that (implicitly) assumes knowledge of the optimal regret, we only require that each base…

We propose feature perturbation, a simple yet effective exploration strategy for contextual bandits that injects randomness directly into feature inputs, instead of randomizing unknown parameters or adding noise to rewards. Remarkably, this…

We develop a new approach to obtaining high probability regret bounds for online learning with bandit feedback against an adaptive adversary. While existing approaches all require carefully constructing optimistic and biased loss…

Contextual bandits with linear payoffs, which are also known as linear bandits, provide a powerful alternative for solving practical problems of sequential decisions, e.g., online advertisements. In the era of big data, contextual data…

Many sequential decision-making problems in communication networks can be modeled as contextual bandit problems, which are natural extensions of the well-known multi-armed bandit problem. In contextual bandit problems, at each time, an…

We prove an instance independent (poly) logarithmic regret for stochastic contextual bandits with linear payoff. Previously, in \cite{chu2011contextual}, a lower bound of $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ is shown for the contextual linear bandit…

Recent works in bandit problems adopted lasso convergence theory in the sequential decision-making setting. Even with fully observed contexts, there are technical challenges that hinder the application of existing lasso convergence theory:…

Recently, several studies (Zhou et al., 2021a; Zhang et al., 2021b; Kim et al., 2021; Zhou and Gu, 2022) have provided variance-dependent regret bounds for linear contextual bandits, which interpolates the regret for the worst-case regime…

Conservative Contextual Bandits (CCBs) address safety in sequential decision making by requiring that an agent's policy, along with minimizing regret, also satisfies a safety constraint: the performance is not worse than a baseline policy…

A challenging aspect of the bandit problem is that a stochastic reward is observed only for the chosen arm and the rewards of other arms remain missing. The dependence of the arm choice on the past context and reward pairs compounds the…

We present Gaptron, a randomized first-order algorithm for online multiclass classification. In the full information setting we show expected mistake bounds with respect to the logistic loss, hinge loss, and the smooth hinge loss with…

We consider a contextual bandit problem with $S$ contexts and $K$ actions. In each round $t=1,2,\dots$, the learner observes a random context and chooses an action based on its past experience. The learner then observes a random reward…

Variance-dependent regret bounds for linear contextual bandits, which improve upon the classical $\tilde{O}(d\sqrt{K})$ regret bound to $\tilde{O}(d\sqrt{\sum_{k=1}^K\sigma_k^2})$, where $d$ is the context dimension, $K$ is the number of…

We introduce contextual queueing bandits, a new context-aware framework for scheduling while simultaneously learning unknown service rates. Individual jobs carry heterogeneous contextual features, based on which the agent chooses a job and…

We study bandit model selection in stochastic environments. Our approach relies on a meta-algorithm that selects between candidate base algorithms. We develop a meta-algorithm-base algorithm abstraction that can work with general classes of…

In this paper, we investigate the impact of context diversity on stochastic linear contextual bandits. As opposed to the previous view that contexts lead to more difficult bandit learning, we show that when the contexts are sufficiently…

This paper studies the Bayesian regret of a variant of the Thompson-Sampling algorithm for bandit problems. It builds upon the information-theoretic framework of [Russo and Van Roy, 2015] and, more specifically, on the rate-distortion…