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Related papers: contextual: Evaluating Contextual Multi-Armed Band…

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We examine a multi-armed bandit problem with contextual information, where the objective is to ensure that each arm receives a minimum aggregated reward across contexts while simultaneously maximizing the total cumulative reward. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Ahmed Ben Yahmed , Hafedh El Ferchichi , Marc Abeille , Vianney Perchet

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Siddhant Chaudhary , Abhishek Sinha

We consider a variant of the contextual bandit problem. In standard contextual bandits, when a user arrives we get the user's complete feature vector and then assign a treatment (arm) to that user. In a number of applications (like…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Susan Athey

We consider the contextual bandit problem on general action and context spaces, where the learner's rewards depend on their selected actions and an observable context. This generalizes the standard multi-armed bandit to the case where side…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-03 Moise Blanchard , Steve Hanneke , Patrick Jaillet

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Kaan Buyukkalayci , Osama Hanna , Christina Fragouli

In recent years, preference-based human feedback mechanisms have become essential for enhancing model performance across diverse applications, including conversational AI systems such as ChatGPT. However, existing approaches often neglect…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Raihan Seraj , Lili Meng , Tristan Sylvain

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

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

This paper considers a contextual bandit problem involving multiple agents, where a learner sequentially observes the contexts and the agent's reported arms, and then selects the arm that maximizes the system's overall reward. Existing work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Arun Verma , Indrajit Saha , Makoto Yokoo , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Ahmed Sayeed Faruk , Elena Zheleva

We present a new algorithm for the contextual bandit learning problem, where the learner repeatedly takes one of $K$ actions in response to the observed context, and observes the reward only for that chosen action. Our method assumes access…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-10-15 Alekh Agarwal , Daniel Hsu , Satyen Kale , John Langford , Lihong Li , Robert E. Schapire

Contextual multi-armed bandits are a popular choice to model sequential decision-making. E.g., in a healthcare application we may perform various tests to asses a patient condition (exploration) and then decide on the best treatment to give…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Mirco Mutti , Jeongyeol Kwon , Shie Mannor , Aviv Tamar

Personalized recommendations for new users, also known as the cold-start problem, can be formulated as a contextual bandit problem. Existing contextual bandit algorithms generally rely on features alone to capture user variability. Such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-25 Li Zhou , Emma Brunskill

We study offline data poisoning attacks in contextual bandits, a class of reinforcement learning problems with important applications in online recommendation and adaptive medical treatment, among others. We provide a general attack…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-27 Yuzhe Ma , Kwang-Sung Jun , Lihong Li , Xiaojin Zhu

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 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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Yue Kang , Cho-Jui Hsieh , Thomas C. M. Lee

Real-world applications of contextual bandits often exhibit non-stationarity due to seasonality, serendipity, and evolving social trends. While a number of non-stationary contextual bandit learning algorithms have been proposed in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Zheqing Zhu , Yueyang Liu , Xu Kuang , Benjamin Van Roy

In the dynamic landscape of online businesses, recommender systems are pivotal in enhancing user experiences. While traditional approaches have relied on static supervised learning, the quest for adaptive, user-centric recommendations has…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-12-22 Yikun Ban , Yunzhe Qi , Jingrui He

In this paper we consider the adversarial contextual bandit problem in metric spaces. The paper "Nearest neighbour with bandit feedback" tackled this problem but when there are many contexts near the decision boundary of the comparator…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Stephen Pasteris , Chris Hicks , Vasilios Mavroudis

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,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-14 Tommaso Aldinucci , Enrico Civitelli , Leonardo di Gangi , Alessandro Sestini