Related papers: Regret Analysis of Bandit Problems with Causal Bac…

We study the stochastic contextual bandit problem, where the reward is generated from an unknown function with additive noise. No assumption is made about the reward function other than boundedness. We propose a new algorithm, NeuralUCB,…

We propose a simple model selection approach for algorithms in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. As opposed to prior work that (implicitly) assumes knowledge of the optimal regret, we only require that each base…

Safety is a desirable property that can immensely increase the applicability of learning algorithms in real-world decision-making problems. It is much easier for a company to deploy an algorithm that is safe, i.e., guaranteed to perform at…

The linear contextual bandit literature is mostly focused on the design of efficient learning algorithms for a given representation. However, a contextual bandit problem may admit multiple linear representations, each one with different…

We study the causal bandit problem that entails identifying a near-optimal intervention from a specified set $A$ of (possibly non-atomic) interventions over a given causal graph. Here, an optimal intervention in ${A}$ is one that maximizes…

Designing causal bandit algorithms depends on two central categories of assumptions: (i) the extent of information about the underlying causal graphs and (ii) the extent of information about interventional statistical models. There have…

The contextual combinatorial semi-bandit problem with linear payoff functions is a decision-making problem in which a learner chooses a set of arms with the feature vectors in each round under given constraints so as to maximize the sum of…

In combinatorial causal bandits (CCB), the learning agent chooses at most $K$ variables in each round to intervene, collects feedback from the observed variables, with the goal of minimizing expected regret on the target variable $Y$. We…

In many fields such as digital marketing, healthcare, finance, and robotics, it is common to have a well-tested and reliable baseline policy running in production (e.g., a recommender system). Nonetheless, the baseline policy is often…

Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithms are a widely-used class of sequential algorithms for the $K$-armed bandit problem. Despite extensive research over the past decades aimed at understanding their asymptotic and (near) minimax…

We study a collaborative multi-agent stochastic linear bandit setting, where $N$ agents that form a network communicate locally to minimize their overall regret. In this setting, each agent has its own linear bandit problem (its own reward…

Contextual bandits serve as a fundamental model for many sequential decision making tasks. The most popular theoretically justified approaches are based on the optimism principle. While these algorithms can be practical, they are known to…

We study the tail behavior of regret in stochastic multi-armed bandits for algorithms that are asymptotically optimal in expectation. While minimizing expected regret is the classical objective, recent work shows that even such algorithms…

We study regret minimization in causal bandits under causal sufficiency where the underlying causal structure is not known to the agent. Previous work has focused on identifying the reward's parents and then applying classic bandit methods…

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…

The deployment of Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) has become commonplace in many economic applications. However, regret guarantees for even state-of-the-art linear bandit algorithms (such as Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty Linear bandit…

We explore algorithms to select actions in the causal bandit setting where the learner can choose to intervene on a set of random variables related by a causal graph, and the learner sequentially chooses interventions and observes a sample…

A fundamental question for companies with large amount of logged data is: How to use such logged data together with incoming streaming data to make good decisions? Many companies currently make decisions via online A/B tests, but wrong…

We study the $K$-armed contextual dueling bandit problem, a sequential decision making setting in which the learner uses contextual information to make two decisions, but only observes \emph{preference-based feedback} suggesting that one…

Dueling bandits is a prominent framework for decision-making involving preferential feedback, a valuable feature that fits various applications involving human interaction, such as ranking, information retrieval, and recommendation systems.…