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Related papers: Stochastic Bandits with Context Distributions

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In decision-making problems such as the multi-armed bandit, an agent learns sequentially by optimizing a certain feedback. While the mean reward criterion has been extensively studied, other measures that reflect an aversion to adverse…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-03-28 Patrick Saux , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard

Designing efficient general-purpose contextual bandit algorithms that work with large -- or even continuous -- action spaces would facilitate application to important scenarios such as information retrieval, recommendation systems, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Yinglun Zhu , Paul Mineiro

We study the problem of model selection in bandit scenarios in the presence of nested policy classes, with the goal of obtaining simultaneous adversarial and stochastic ("best of both worlds") high-probability regret guarantees. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-01 Aldo Pacchiano , Christoph Dann , Claudio Gentile

An agent in a nonstationary contextual bandit problem should balance between exploration and the exploitation of (periodic or structured) patterns present in its previous experiences. Handcrafting an appropriate historical context is an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Aditya Ramesh , Paulo Rauber , Michelangelo Conserva , Jürgen Schmidhuber

A fundamental challenge in contextual bandits is to develop flexible, general-purpose algorithms with computational requirements no worse than classical supervised learning tasks such as classification and regression. Algorithms based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin

We analyze the $K$-armed bandit problem where the reward for each arm is a noisy realization based on an observed context under mild nonparametric assumptions. We attain tight results for top-arm identification and a sublinear regret of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-08 Melody Y. Guan , Heinrich Jiang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-09 Alekh Agarwal , Claudio Gentile , Teodor V. Marinov

Recent advances in learning techniques have garnered attention for their applicability to a diverse range of real-world sequential decision-making problems. Yet, many practical applications have critical constraints for operation in real…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Jose A. Ayala-Romero , Andres Garcia-Saavedra , Xavier Costa-Perez

We propose combinatorial cascading bandits, a class of partial monitoring problems where at each step a learning agent chooses a tuple of ground items subject to constraints and receives a reward if and only if the weights of all chosen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-11-18 Branislav Kveton , Zheng Wen , Azin Ashkan , Csaba Szepesvari

Motivated by practical needs such as large-scale learning, we study the impact of adaptivity constraints to linear contextual bandits, a central problem in online active learning. We consider two popular limited adaptivity models in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-26 Yufei Ruan , Jiaqi Yang , Yuan Zhou

We consider contextual bandit learning under distribution shift when reward vectors are ordered according to a given preference cone. We propose an adaptive-discretization and optimistic elimination based policy that self-tunes to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Apurv Shukla , P. R. Kumar

Conservative mechanism is a desirable property in decision-making problems which balance the tradeoff between the exploration and exploitation. We propose the novel \emph{conservative contextual combinatorial cascading bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-26 Kun Wang , Canzhe Zhao , Shuai Li , Shuo Shao

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

We address a generalization of the bandit with knapsacks problem, where a learner aims to maximize rewards while satisfying an arbitrary set of long-term constraints. Our goal is to design best-of-both-worlds algorithms that perform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Martino Bernasconi , Matteo Castiglioni , Andrea Celli , Federico Fusco

The Causal Bandit is a variant of the classic Bandit problem where an agent must identify the best action in a sequential decision-making process, where the reward distribution of the actions displays a non-trivial dependence structure that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-30 Arnoud A. W. M. de Kroon , Danielle Belgrave , Joris M. Mooij

Collaborative bandit learning, i.e., bandit algorithms that utilize collaborative filtering techniques to improve sample efficiency in online interactive recommendation, has attracted much research attention as it enjoys the best of both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-16 Chuanhao Li , Qingyun Wu , Hongning Wang

We study the Inverse Contextual Bandit (ICB) problem, in which a learner seeks to optimize a policy while an observer, who cannot access the learner's rewards and only observes actions, aims to recover the underlying problem parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Yuqi Kong , Xiao Zhang , Weiran Shen

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-03 Hao Yan , Heyan Zhang , Yongyi Guo

For traffic routing platforms, the choice of which route to recommend to a user depends on the congestion on these routes -- indeed, an individual's utility depends on the number of people using the recommended route at that instance.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-24 Pranjal Awasthi , Kush Bhatia , Sreenivas Gollapudi , Kostas Kollias

We design and implement an adaptive experiment (a ``contextual bandit'') to learn a targeted treatment assignment policy, where the goal is to use a participant's survey responses to determine which charity to expose them to in a donation…