Related papers: CAB: Continuous Adaptive Blending Estimator for Po…
Accurately evaluating new policies (e.g. ad-placement models, ranking functions, recommendation functions) is one of the key prerequisites for improving interactive systems. While the conventional approach to evaluation relies on online A/B…
Before A/B testing online a new version of a recommender system, it is usual to perform some offline evaluations on historical data. We focus on evaluation methods that compute an estimator of the potential uplift in revenue that could…
The (contextual) multi-armed bandit problem (MAB) provides a formalization of sequential decision-making which has many applications. However, validly evaluating MAB policies is challenging; we either resort to simulations which inherently…
What is the most statistically efficient way to do off-policy evaluation and optimization with batch data from bandit feedback? For log data generated by contextual bandit algorithms, we consider offline estimators for the expected reward…
We investigate a novel cluster-of-bandit algorithm CAB for collaborative recommendation tasks that implements the underlying feedback sharing mechanism by estimating the neighborhood of users in a context-dependent manner. CAB makes sharp…
Contextual bandit algorithms are increasingly replacing non-adaptive A/B tests in e-commerce, healthcare, and policymaking because they can both improve outcomes for study participants and increase the chance of identifying good or even…
Efficient methods to evaluate new algorithms are critical for improving interactive bandit and reinforcement learning systems such as recommendation systems. A/B tests are reliable, but are time- and money-consuming, and entail a risk of…
Methods for offline A/B testing and counterfactual learning are seeing rapid adoption in search and recommender systems, since they allow efficient reuse of existing log data. However, there are fundamental limits to using existing log data…
Conformal prediction has emerged as an effective strategy for uncertainty quantification by modifying a model to output sets of labels instead of a single label. These prediction sets come with the guarantee that they contain the true label…
We address policy learning with logged data in contextual bandits. Current offline-policy learning algorithms are mostly based on inverse propensity score (IPS) weighting requiring the logging policy to have \emph{full support} i.e. a…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) attempts to predict the performance of counterfactual policies using log data from a different policy. We extend its applicability by developing an OPE method for a class of both full support and deficient…
We study the offline contextual bandit problem, where we aim to acquire an optimal policy using observational data. However, this data usually contains two deficiencies: (i) some variables that confound actions are not observed, and (ii)…
The combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) is a fundamental sequential decision-making framework, extensively studied over the past decade. However, existing work primarily focuses on the online setting, overlooking the substantial costs…
We present and prove properties of a new offline policy evaluator for an exploration learning setting which is superior to previous evaluators. In particular, it simultaneously and correctly incorporates techniques from importance…
We propose an efficient Context-Aware clustering of Bandits (CAB) algorithm, which can capture collaborative effects. CAB can be easily deployed in a real-world recommendation system, where multi-armed bandits have been shown to perform…
The contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a widely used framework for problems requiring sequential decision-making under uncertainty, such as recommendation systems. In applications involving a large number of users, the performance of…
We study counterfactual classification as a new tool for decision-making under hypothetical (contrary to fact) scenarios. We propose a doubly-robust nonparametric estimator for a general counterfactual classifier, where we can incorporate…
We present an online tutoring system that learns to provide effective feedback to students after they answer questions incorrectly. Using data from one million students, the system learns which assistance action (e.g., one of multiple…
This paper investigates off-policy evaluation in contextual bandits, aiming to quantify the performance of a target policy using data collected under a different and potentially unknown behavior policy. Recently, methods based on conformal…
Deep learning techniques have dominated the literature on aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), achieving state-of-the-art performance. However, deep models generally suffer from spurious correlations between input features and output…