Related papers: Conversational Contextual Bandit: Algorithm and Ap…
We study the problem of federated contextual combinatorial cascading bandits, where $|\mathcal{U}|$ agents collaborate under the coordination of a central server to provide tailored recommendations to the $|\mathcal{U}|$ corresponding…
A major challenge in contextual bandits is to design general-purpose algorithms that are both practically useful and theoretically well-founded. We present a new technique that has the empirical and computational advantages of…
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…
Contextual bandits are online learners that, given an input, select an arm and receive a reward for that arm. They use the reward as a learning signal and aim to maximize the total reward over the inputs. Contextual bandits are commonly…
We propose an extensible deep learning method that uses reinforcement learning to train neural networks for offline ranking in information retrieval (IR). We call our method BanditRank as it treats ranking as a contextual bandit problem. In…
Web-based applications such as chatbots, search engines and news recommendations continue to grow in scale and complexity with the recent surge in the adoption of LLMs. Online model selection has thus garnered increasing attention due to…
We study an online decision making problem where on each round a learner chooses a list of items based on some side information, receives a scalar feedback value for each individual item, and a reward that is linearly related to this…
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…
Contextual bandit algorithms have transformed modern experimentation by enabling real-time adaptation for personalized treatment and efficient use of data. Yet these advantages create challenges for statistical inference due to adaptivity.…
We consider a contextual bandit problem with a combinatorial action set and time-varying base arm availability. At the beginning of each round, the agent observes the set of available base arms and their contexts and then selects an action…
This paper presents a new contextual bandit algorithm, NeuralBandit, which does not need hypothesis on stationarity of contexts and rewards. Several neural networks are trained to modelize the value of rewards knowing the context. Two…
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…
In this paper we consider the adversarial contextual bandit problem in metric spaces. The paper "Nearest neighbour with bandit feedback" tackled this problem but when there are many contexts near the decision boundary of the comparator…
In today's technology environment, information is abundant, dynamic, and heterogeneous in nature. Automated filtering and prioritization of information is based on the distinction between whether the information adds substantial value…
Interactive recommender systems that enable the interactions between users and the recommender system have attracted increasing research attentions. Previous methods mainly focus on optimizing recommendation accuracy. However, they usually…
Explosive demands for LLMs often cause user queries to accumulate in server queues, requiring efficient routing (query-LLM matching) and scheduling (query prioritization) mechanisms. Several online algorithms are being deployed, but they…
In many sequential decision-making problems, the individuals are split into several batches and the decision-maker is only allowed to change her policy at the end of batches. These batch problems have a large number of applications, ranging…
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…
In this paper, we tackle the computational efficiency of kernelized UCB algorithms in contextual bandits. While standard methods require a O(CT^3) complexity where T is the horizon and the constant C is related to optimizing the UCB rule,…
In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, instance-dependent algorithms attain improved performance on "easy" problems with a gap between the best and second-best arm. Are similar guarantees possible for contextual bandits? While…