Related papers: Conversational Contextual Bandit: Algorithm and Ap…
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…
We study contextual bandit (CB) problems, where the user can sometimes respond with the best action in a given context. Such an interaction arises, for example, in text prediction or autocompletion settings, where a poor suggestion is…
Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…
We introduce a latency-aware contextual bandit framework that generalizes the standard contextual bandit problem, where the learner adaptively selects arms and switches decision sets under action delays. In this setting, the learner…
The rise of large-scale pretrained models has made it feasible to generate predictive or synthetic features at low cost, raising the question of how to incorporate such surrogate predictions into downstream decision-making. We study this…
The last decade has witnessed many successes of deep learning-based models for industry-scale recommender systems. These models are typically trained offline in a batch manner. While being effective in capturing users' past interactions…
The contextual duelling bandit problem models adaptive recommender systems, where the algorithm presents a set of items to the user, and the user's choice reveals their preference. This setup is well suited for implicit choices users make…
Contextual bandit algorithms -- a class of multi-armed bandit algorithms that exploit the contextual information -- have been shown to be effective in solving sequential decision making problems under uncertainty. A common assumption…
We study Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits (CMABs) for non-episodic sequential decision making problems where the context includes both textual and numerical information (e.g., recommendation systems, dynamic portfolio adjustments, offer…
This paper presents a new algorithm for neural contextual bandits (CBs) that addresses the challenge of delayed reward feedback, where the reward for a chosen action is revealed after a random, unknown delay. This scenario is common in…
Contextual bandits (CB) are online sequential decision-making problems under partial feedback that underpin many adaptive services. There is a growing demand to deploy CB agents directly on-device, under strict constraints on memory,…
We study a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, where at each time step, the player observes an independently sampled context that determines the arms' mean rewards. However, playing an arm blocks it (across all contexts) for a…
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…
In many fields such as digital marketing, healthcare, finance, and robotics, it is common to have a well-tested and reliable baseline policy running in production (e.g., a recommender system). Nonetheless, the baseline policy is often…
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 reward associated with each context-based decision may not always be…
We consider the problem of contextual bandits and imitation learning, where the learner lacks direct knowledge of the executed action's reward. Instead, the learner can actively query an expert at each round to compare two actions and…
Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the strategy deployed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. Further, often we have only partial information on the state of the system. We study the…
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…
A standard assumption in contextual multi-arm bandit is that the true context is perfectly known before arm selection. Nonetheless, in many practical applications (e.g., cloud resource management), prior to arm selection, the context…
Contextual bandits have emerged as a cornerstone in reinforcement learning, enabling systems to make decisions with partial feedback. However, as contexts grow in complexity, traditional bandit algorithms can face challenges in adequately…