Related papers: Target Tracking for Contextual Bandits: Applicatio…

We study linear contextual bandits in the misspecified setting, where the expected reward function can be approximated by a linear function class up to a bounded misspecification level $\zeta>0$. We propose an algorithm based on a novel…

Contextual bandit algorithms often estimate reward models to inform decision-making. However, true rewards can contain action-independent redundancies that are not relevant for decision-making. We show it is more data-efficient to estimate…

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…

Clinical trials involving multiple treatments utilize randomization of the treatment assignments to enable the evaluation of treatment efficacies in an unbiased manner. Such evaluation is performed in post hoc studies that usually use…

The standard contextual bandit framework assumes fully observable and actionable contexts. In this work, we consider a new bandit setting with partially observable, correlated contexts and linear payoffs, motivated by the applications in…

We consider a remote contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) problem, in which the decision-maker observes the context and the reward, but must communicate the actions to be taken by the agents over a rate-limited communication channel. This…

We introduce the factored bandits model, which is a framework for learning with limited (bandit) feedback, where actions can be decomposed into a Cartesian product of atomic actions. Factored bandits incorporate rank-1 bandits as a special…

This paper is a scoping study to identify current methods used in handling sparse data with contextual bandits in web settings. The area is highly current and state of the art methods are identified. The years 2017-2020 are investigated,…

Personalization is a crucial aspect of many online experiences. In particular, content ranking is often a key component in delivering sophisticated personalization results. Commonly, supervised learning-to-rank methods are applied, which…

We consider a novel variant of the contextual bandit problem (i.e., the multi-armed bandit with side-information, or context, available to a decision-maker) where the context used at each decision may be corrupted ("useless context"). This…

In this paper, we analyze and extend an online learning framework known as Context-Attentive Bandit, motivated by various practical applications, from medical diagnosis to dialog systems, where due to observation costs only a small subset…

Psychological research shows that enjoyment of many goods is subject to satiation, with short-term satisfaction declining after repeated exposures to the same item. Nevertheless, proposed algorithms for powering recommender systems seldom…

We study the stochastic contextual bandit problem, where the reward is generated from an unknown function with additive noise. No assumption is made about the reward function other than boundedness. We propose a new algorithm, NeuralUCB,…

Many efficient algorithms with strong theoretical guarantees have been proposed for the contextual multi-armed bandit problem. However, applying these algorithms in practice can be difficult because they require domain expertise to build…

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…

Recently, self-learning methods based on user satisfaction metrics and contextual bandits have shown promising results to enable consistent improvements in conversational AI systems. However, directly targeting such metrics by off-policy…

Motivated by scenarios of information diffusion and advertising in social media, we study an influence maximization problem in which little is assumed to be known about the diffusion network or about the model that determines how…

Originally motivated by default risk management applications, this paper investigates a novel problem, referred to as the profitable bandit problem here. At each step, an agent chooses a subset of the K possible actions. For each action…

We study contextual bandits in the stochastic i.i.d.\ setting, where a learner observes contexts drawn from an unknown distribution, selects actions from a finite set $A$, and aims to identify an approximately optimal policy from a given…

Contextual bandits serve as a fundamental algorithmic framework for optimizing recommendation decisions online. Though extensive attention has been paid to tailoring contextual bandits for recommendation applications, the "herding effects"…