Related papers: Recommendation System-based Upper Confidence Bound…
By exploiting the computing power and local data of distributed clients, federated learning (FL) features ubiquitous properties such as reduction of communication overhead and preserving data privacy. In each communication round of FL, the…
We study a finite-horizon restless multi-armed bandit problem with multiple actions, dubbed R(MA)^2B. The state of each arm evolves according to a controlled Markov decision process (MDP), and the reward of pulling an arm depends on both…
This paper considers the use of a simple posterior sampling algorithm to balance between exploration and exploitation when learning to optimize actions such as in multi-armed bandit problems. The algorithm, also known as Thompson Sampling,…
With the increasingly widespread application of machine learning, how to strike a balance between protecting the privacy of data and algorithm parameters and ensuring the verifiability of machine learning has always been a challenge. This…
This paper is concerned with online targeted advertising on social networks. The main technical task we address is to estimate the activation probability for user pairs, which quantifies the influence one user may have on another towards…
Restless multi-armed bandits (RMAB) have been widely used to model sequential decision making problems with constraints. The decision maker (DM) aims to maximize the expected total reward over an infinite horizon under an "instantaneous…
Edge Computing (EC) offers a superior user experience by positioning cloud resources in close proximity to end users. The challenge of allocating edge resources efficiently while maximizing profit for the EC platform remains a sophisticated…
The contextual bandit has been identified as a powerful framework to formulate the recommendation process as a sequential decision-making process, where each item is regarded as an arm and the objective is to minimize the regret of $T$…
Recommender systems often rely on observational user--item interaction data, which is prone to selection bias due to users' selective interactions with items. Inverse propensity weighting and doubly robust estimators effectively mitigate…
We formalize sequential decision-making with information acquisition as the probing-augmented user-centric selection (PUCS) framework, where a learner first probes a subset of arms to obtain side information on resources and rewards, and…
Online platforms in the Internet Economy commonly incorporate recommender systems that recommend products (or "arms") to users (or "agents"). A key challenge in this domain arises from myopic agents who are naturally incentivized to exploit…
Recommender systems rely heavily on increasing computation resources to improve their business goal. By deploying computation-intensive models and algorithms, these systems are able to inference user interests and exhibit certain ads or…
Conversational Recommendation System (CRS) is a rapidly growing research area that has gained significant attention alongside advancements in language modelling techniques. However, the current state of conversational recommendation faces…
A key challenge for a reinforcement learning (RL) agent is to incorporate external/expert1 advice in its learning. The desired goals of an algorithm that can shape the learning of an RL agent with external advice include (a) maintaining…
We consider the problem of finitely parameterized multi-armed bandits where the model of the underlying stochastic environment can be characterized based on a common unknown parameter. The true parameter is unknown to the learning agent.…
We propose $\tt RandUCB$, a bandit strategy that builds on theoretically derived confidence intervals similar to upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms, but akin to Thompson sampling (TS), it uses randomization to trade off exploration and…
Gaussian process upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) is a theoretically promising approach for black-box optimization; however, the confidence parameter $\beta$ is considerably large in the theorem and chosen heuristically in practice. Then,…
We study in this paper a revenue management problem with add-on discounts. The problem is motivated by the practice in the video game industry, where a retailer offers discounts on selected supportive products (e.g. video games) to…
Motivated by applications of bandit algorithms in education, we consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with $\varepsilon$-contaminated rewards. We allow an adversary to give arbitrary unbounded contaminated rewards with full…
Learning reinforcement learning (RL)-based recommenders from historical user-item interaction sequences is vital to generate high-reward recommendations and improve long-term cumulative benefits. However, existing RL recommendation methods…