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Related papers: Contextual Bandits Evolving Over Finite Time

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There are two variants of the classical multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem that have received considerable attention from machine learning researchers in recent years: contextual bandits and simple regret minimization. Contextual bandits are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-27 Aniket Anand Deshmukh , Srinagesh Sharma , James W. Cutler , Mark Moldwin , Clayton Scott

Contextual bandit algorithms are commonly used in digital health to recommend personalized treatments. However, to ensure the effectiveness of the treatments, patients are often requested to take actions that have no immediate benefit to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Kyra Gan , Esmaeil Keyvanshokooh , Xueqing Liu , Susan Murphy

We study bandit learning in matching markets, where players and arms constitute the two market sides, and the players' utilities are linear in the arm contexts. In each round, new arms arrive with observable contexts. Then, the algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Shiyun Lin , Simon Mauras , Vianney Perchet , Nadav Merlis

Contextual bandit algorithms often estimate reward models to inform decision-making. However, true rewards can contain action-independent redundancies that are not relevant for decision-making. We show it is more data-efficient to estimate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-27 Aldo Gael Carranza , Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Susan Athey

While contextual bandit has a mature theory, effectively leveraging different feedback patterns to enhance the pace of learning remains unclear. Bandits with feedback graphs, which interpolates between the full information and bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Mengxiao Zhang , Yuheng Zhang , Olga Vrousgou , Haipeng Luo , Paul Mineiro

In this work, we investigate the problem of adapting to the presence or absence of causal structure in multi-armed bandit problems. In addition to the usual reward signal, we assume the learner has access to additional variables, observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Ziyi Liu , Idan Attias , Daniel M. Roy

We consider the problem of contextual bandits where actions are subsets of a ground set and mean rewards are modeled by an unknown monotone submodular function that belongs to a class $\mathcal{F}$. We allow time-varying matroid constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Dean P. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin

In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Ruohan Zhan , Susan Athey , Emma Brunskill

Typical contextual bandit algorithms assume that the rewards at each round lie in some fixed range $[0, R]$, and their regret scales polynomially with this reward range $R$. However, many practical scenarios naturally involve heavy-tailed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-05 Chenlu Ye , Yujia Jin , Alekh Agarwal , Tong Zhang

Contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) achieves cutting-edge performance on a variety of problems. When it comes to real-world scenarios such as recommendation system and online advertising, however, it is essential to consider the resource…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Mengyue Yang , Qingyang Li , Zhiwei Qin , Jieping Ye

Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-07 Branislav Kveton , Martin Mladenov , Chih-Wei Hsu , Manzil Zaheer , Csaba Szepesvari , Craig Boutilier

We study the contextual multi-armed bandit problem with a finite context space (a.k.a. subpopulations), where the learner recommends a best action for each context and is evaluated by context-weighted simple regret. Our guarantees are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Mohammad Shahverdikondori , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash

In this paper, we introduce the notion of replicable policies in the context of stochastic bandits, one of the canonical problems in interactive learning. A policy in the bandit environment is called replicable if it pulls, with high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-16 Hossein Esfandiari , Alkis Kalavasis , Amin Karbasi , Andreas Krause , Vahab Mirrokni , Grigoris Velegkas

Thanks to the power of representation learning, neural contextual bandit algorithms demonstrate remarkable performance improvement against their classical counterparts. But because their exploration has to be performed in the entire neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Yiling Jia , Weitong Zhang , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu , Hongning Wang

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-25 Aadirupa Saha , Akshay Krishnamurthy

In bandit settings, optimizing long-term regret metrics requires exploration, which corresponds to sometimes taking myopically sub-optimal actions. When a long-lived principal merely recommends actions to be executed by a sequence of…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Ramya Ramalingam , Osbert Bastani , Aaron Roth

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

While classical formulations of multi-armed bandit problems assume that each arm's reward is independent and stationary, real-world applications often involve non-stationary environments and interdependencies between arms. In particular,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Ryoma Sato , Shinji Ito

In the classical contextual bandits problem, in each round $t$, a learner observes some context $c$, chooses some action $i$ to perform, and receives some reward $r_{i,t}(c)$. We consider the variant of this problem where in addition to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-17 Santiago Balseiro , Negin Golrezaei , Mohammad Mahdian , Vahab Mirrokni , Jon Schneider