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Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at in-context learning (ICL), a supervised learning technique that relies on adding annotated examples to the model context. We investigate a contextual bandit version of in-context reinforcement learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Giovanni Monea , Antoine Bosselut , Kianté Brantley , Yoav Artzi

Contextual bandits are incredibly useful in many practical problems. We go one step further by devising a more realistic problem that combines: (1) contextual bandits with dense arm features, (2) non-linear reward functions, and (3) a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Wei Min Loh , Sajib Kumer Sinha , Ankur Agarwal , Pascal Poupart

We consider the contextual bandit problem where at each time, the agent only has access to a noisy version of the context and the error variance (or an estimator of this variance). This setting is motivated by a wide range of applications…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-19 Yongyi Guo , Ziping Xu , Susan Murphy

While contextual bandit has a mature theory, effectively leveraging different feedback patterns to enhance the pace of learning remains unclear. Bandits with feedback graphs, which interpolates between the full information and bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Mengxiao Zhang , Yuheng Zhang , Olga Vrousgou , Haipeng Luo , Paul Mineiro

Multi-armed bandit algorithms have become a reference solution for handling the explore/exploit dilemma in recommender systems, and many other important real-world problems, such as display advertisement. However, such algorithms usually…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-25 Qingyun Wu , Naveen Iyer , Hongning Wang

Contextual bandit algorithms are commonly used in digital health to recommend personalized treatments. However, to ensure the effectiveness of the treatments, patients are often requested to take actions that have no immediate benefit to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Kyra Gan , Esmaeil Keyvanshokooh , Xueqing Liu , Susan Murphy

In contextual linear bandits, the reward function is assumed to be a linear combination of an unknown reward vector and a given embedding of context-arm pairs. In practice, the embedding is often learned at the same time as the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-20 Andrea Tirinzoni , Matteo Pirotta , Alessandro Lazaric

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 propose a contextual bandit based model to capture the learning and social welfare goals of a web platform in the presence of myopic users. By using payments to incentivize these agents to explore different items/recommendations, we show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-23 Priyank Agrawal , Theja Tulabandhula

Understanding a decision-maker's priorities by observing their behavior is critical for transparency and accountability in decision processes, such as in healthcare. Though conventional approaches to policy learning almost invariably assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-09 Alihan Hüyük , Daniel Jarrett , Mihaela van der Schaar

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents are commonly trained and evaluated in the same environment. In contrast, humans often train in a specialized environment before being evaluated, such as studying a book before taking an exam. The potential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Jarek Liesen , Chris Lu , Andrei Lupu , Jakob N. Foerster , Henning Sprekeler , Robert T. Lange

Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits is a well-known and accepted online optimization algorithm, that is used in many Web experiences to tailor content or presentation to users' traffic. Much has been published on theoretical guarantees (e.g.…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-07-12 David Abensur , Ivan Balashov , Shaked Bar , Ronny Lempel , Nurit Moscovici , Ilan Orlov , Danny Rosenstein , Ido Tamir

We present substantial evidence demonstrating the benefits of integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with a Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit framework. Contextual bandits have been widely used in recommendation systems to generate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Parand A. Alamdari , Yanshuai Cao , Kevin H. Wilson

Contextual linear bandits is a rich and theoretically important model that has many practical applications. Recently, this setup gained a lot of interest in applications over wireless where communication constraints can be a performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-10 Osama A. Hanna , Lin F. Yang , Christina Fragouli

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

We study the sequential batch learning problem in linear contextual bandits with finite action sets, where the decision maker is constrained to split incoming individuals into (at most) a fixed number of batches and can only observe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-15 Yanjun Han , Zhengqing Zhou , Zhengyuan Zhou , Jose Blanchet , Peter W. Glynn , Yinyu Ye

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Alekh Agarwal , H. Brendan McMahan , Zheng Xu

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

We propose and deploy an approach to continually train an instruction-following agent from feedback provided by users during collaborative interactions. During interaction, human users instruct an agent using natural language, and provide…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-07 Alane Suhr , Yoav Artzi

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Rohan Deb , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Arindam Banerjee