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Taking advantage of contextual information can potentially boost the performance of recommender systems. In the era of big data, such side information often has several dimensions. Thus, developing decision-making algorithms to cope with…
In multi-server queueing systems where there is no central queue holding all incoming jobs, job dispatching policies are used to assign incoming jobs to the queue at one of the servers. Classic job dispatching policies such as…
We study the federated pure exploration problem of multi-armed bandits and linear bandits, where $M$ agents cooperatively identify the best arm via communicating with the central server. To enhance the robustness against latency and…
Peer reviews, evaluations, and selections are a fundamental aspect of modern science. Funding bodies the world over employ experts to review and select the best proposals from those submitted for funding. The problem of peer selection,…
There is a rising interest in industrial online applications where data becomes available sequentially. Inspired by the recommendation of playlists to users where their preferences can be collected during the listening of the entire…
Composed image retrieval aims to find an image that best matches a given multi-modal user query consisting of a reference image and text pair. Existing methods commonly pre-compute image embeddings over the entire corpus and compare these…
The multi-armed bandit problem (MBP) is the problem of finding, as accurately and quickly as possible, the most profitable option from a set of options that gives stochastic rewards by referring to past experiences. Inspired by fluctuated…
Although the classical version of the Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) framework has been applied successfully to several practical problems, in many real-world applications, the possible actions are not presented to the learner simultaneously,…
Prompt engineering has become central to eliciting the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). At its core lies prompt selection -- efficiently identifying the most effective prompts. However, most prior investigations overlook a key…
Random embedding has been applied with empirical success to large-scale black-box optimization problems with low effective dimensions. This paper proposes the EmbeddedHunter algorithm, which incorporates the technique in a hierarchical…
The recent advances of conversational recommendations provide a promising way to efficiently elicit users' preferences via conversational interactions. To achieve this, the recommender system conducts conversations with users, asking their…
Multi-objective combinatorial optimization seeks Pareto-optimal solutions over exponentially large discrete spaces, yet existing methods sacrifice generality, scalability, or theoretical guarantees. We reformulate it as an online learning…
Motivated by problems in search and detection we present a solution to a Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit (CMAB) problem with both heavy-tailed reward distributions and a new class of feedback, filtered semibandit feedback. In a CMAB…
In a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, an online algorithm makes a sequence of choices. In each round it chooses from a time-invariant set of alternatives and receives the payoff associated with this alternative. While the case of small…
The ever-increasing number of applications to job positions presents a challenge for employers to find suitable candidates manually. We present an end-to-end solution for ranking candidates based on their suitability to a job description.…
Pure exploration (aka active testing) is the fundamental task of sequentially gathering information to answer a query about a stochastic environment. Good algorithms make few mistakes and take few samples. Lower bounds (for multi-armed…
We consider bandit problems involving a large (possibly infinite) collection of arms, in which the expected reward of each arm is a linear function of an $r$-dimensional random vector $\mathbf{Z} \in \mathbb{R}^r$, where $r \geq 2$. The…
We study the combinatorial semi-bandit problem where an agent selects a subset of base arms and receives individual feedback. While this generalizes the classical multi-armed bandit and has broad applicability, its scalability is limited by…
In the edge computing paradigm, mobile devices offload the computational tasks to an edge server by routing the required data over the wireless network. The full potential of edge computing becomes realized only if a smart device selects…
Online ranker evaluation is one of the key challenges in information retrieval. While the preferences of rankers can be inferred by interleaving methods, the problem of how to effectively choose the ranker pair that generates the…