Related papers: contextual: Evaluating Contextual Multi-Armed Band…
We propose online algorithms for sequential learning in the contextual multi-armed bandit setting. Our approach is to partition the context space and then optimally combine all of the possible mappings between the partition regions and the…
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 $T$…
Contextual bandit algorithms have become popular for online recommendation systems such as Digg, Yahoo! Buzz, and news recommendation in general. \emph{Offline} evaluation of the effectiveness of new algorithms in these applications is…
In recent years, multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework has attracted a lot of attention in various applications, from recommender systems and information retrieval to healthcare and finance, due to its stellar performance combined with certain…
An agent in a nonstationary contextual bandit problem should balance between exploration and the exploitation of (periodic or structured) patterns present in its previous experiences. Handcrafting an appropriate historical context is an…
Bandit learning is characterized by the tension between long-term exploration and short-term exploitation. However, as has recently been noted, in settings in which the choices of the learning algorithm correspond to important decisions…
Object-goal navigation (Object-nav) entails searching, recognizing and navigating to a target object. Object-nav has been extensively studied by the Embodied-AI community, but most solutions are often restricted to considering static…
Model selection in contextual bandits is an important complementary problem to regret minimization with respect to a fixed model class. We consider the simplest non-trivial instance of model-selection: distinguishing a simple multi-armed…
Precision oncology, the genetic sequencing of tumors to identify druggable targets, has emerged as the standard of care in the treatment of many cancers. Nonetheless, due to the pace of therapy development and variability in patient…
We consider an online decision making setting known as contextual bandit problem, and propose an approach for improving contextual bandit performance by using an adaptive feature extraction (representation learning) based on online…
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 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…
We consider a contextual version of multi-armed bandit problem with global knapsack constraints. In each round, the outcome of pulling an arm is a scalar reward and a resource consumption vector, both dependent on the context, and the…
Contextual bandit learning is a reinforcement learning problem where the learner repeatedly receives a set of features (context), takes an action and receives a reward based on the action and context. We consider this problem under a…
In this work, we describe practical lessons we have learned from successfully using contextual bandits (CBs) to improve key business metrics of the Microsoft Virtual Agent for customer support. While our current use cases focus on single…
Preference-based feedback is important for many applications where direct evaluation of a reward function is not feasible. A notable recent example arises in reinforcement learning from human feedback on large language models. For many of…
Contextual bandits often provide simple and effective personalization in decision making problems, making them popular tools to deliver personalized interventions in mobile health as well as other health applications. However, when bandits…
We study the $K$-armed contextual dueling bandit problem, a sequential decision making setting in which the learner uses contextual information to make two decisions, but only observes \emph{preference-based feedback} suggesting that one…
The multi-armed bandit problem is a core framework for sequential decision-making under uncertainty, but classical algorithms often fail in environments with hidden, time-varying states that confound reward estimation and optimal action…
As the adoption of federated learning increases for learning from sensitive data local to user devices, it is natural to ask if the learning can be done using implicit signals generated as users interact with the applications of interest,…