Related papers: Regret Analysis of Bandit Problems with Causal Bac…
Learning good interventions in a causal graph can be modelled as a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with side-information. First, we study this problem when interventions are more expensive than observations and a budget is specified.…
We study the problem of learning 'good' interventions in a stochastic environment modeled by its underlying causal graph. Good interventions refer to interventions that maximize rewards. Specifically, we consider the setting of a…
The causal bandit problem seeks to identify, through sequential experimentation, an intervention that maximizes the expected reward in a causal system modeled by a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Existing methods typically assume that the…
This paper investigates the robustness of causal bandits (CBs) in the face of temporal model fluctuations. This setting deviates from the existing literature's widely-adopted assumption of constant causal models. The focus is on causal…
Contextual bandits are a rich model for sequential decision making given side information, with important applications, e.g., in recommender systems. We propose novel algorithms for contextual bandits harnessing neural networks to…
Causal knowledge about the relationships among decision variables and a reward variable in a bandit setting can accelerate the learning of an optimal decision. Current works often assume the causal graph is known, which may not always be…
This paper considers causal bandits (CBs) for the sequential design of interventions in a causal system. The objective is to optimize a reward function via minimizing a measure of cumulative regret with respect to the best sequence of…
We study the problem of determining the best intervention in a Causal Bayesian Network (CBN) specified only by its causal graph. We model this as a stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem with side-information, where the interventions…
Sequential design of experiments for optimizing a reward function in causal systems can be effectively modeled by the sequential design of interventions in causal bandits (CBs). In the existing literature on CBs, a critical assumption is…
Conservative Contextual Bandits (CCBs) address safety in sequential decision making by requiring that an agent's policy, along with minimizing regret, also satisfies a safety constraint: the performance is not worse than a baseline policy…
In combinatorial causal bandits (CCB), the learning agent chooses a subset of variables in each round to intervene and collects feedback from the observed variables to minimize expected regret or sample complexity. Previous works study this…
This paper studies bandit problems where an agent has access to offline data that might be utilized to potentially improve the estimation of each arm's reward distribution. A major obstacle in this setting is the existence of compound…
This paper studies the problem of designing an optimal sequence of interventions in a causal graphical model to minimize cumulative regret with respect to the best intervention in hindsight. This is, naturally, posed as a causal bandit…
Although real-world decision-making problems can often be encoded as causal multi-armed bandits (CMABs) at different levels of abstraction, a general methodology exploiting the information and computational advantages of each abstraction…
We study the problem of using causal models to improve the rate at which good interventions can be learned online in a stochastic environment. Our formalism combines multi-arm bandits and causal inference to model a novel type of bandit…
Bandit is a framework for designing sequential experiments. In each experiment, a learner selects an arm $A \in \mathcal{A}$ and obtains an observation corresponding to $A$. Theoretically, the tight regret lower-bound for the general bandit…
Contextual bandits are widely used in Internet services from news recommendation to advertising, and to Web search. Generalized linear models (logistical regression in particular) have demonstrated stronger performance than linear models in…
Motivated by the pressing need for efficient optimization in online recommender systems, we revisit the cascading bandit model proposed by Kveton et al. (2015). While Thompson sampling (TS) algorithms have been shown to be empirically…
We study the causal bandit problem when the causal graph is unknown and develop an efficient algorithm for finding the parent node of the reward node using atomic interventions. We derive the exact equation for the expected number of…
By leveraging the representation power of deep neural networks, neural upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms have shown success in contextual bandits. To further balance the exploration and exploitation, we propose…