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Related papers: Contextual Bandits Evolving Over Finite Time

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Offline contextual bandits allow one to learn policies from historical/offline data without requiring online interaction. However, offline policy optimization that maximizes overall expected rewards can unintentionally amplify the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Yihong Guo , Junjie Luo , Guodong Gao , Ritu Agarwal , Anqi Liu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Rohan Deb , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Arindam Banerjee

Contextual bandits are online learners that, given an input, select an arm and receive a reward for that arm. They use the reward as a learning signal and aim to maximize the total reward over the inputs. Contextual bandits are commonly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-14 Awni Hannun , Brian Knott , Shubho Sengupta , Laurens van der Maaten

Contextual bandits have emerged as a cornerstone in reinforcement learning, enabling systems to make decisions with partial feedback. However, as contexts grow in complexity, traditional bandit algorithms can face challenges in adequately…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Ali Baheri , Cecilia O. Alm

In this work, we study clustered contextual bandits where rewards and resource consumption are the outcomes of cluster-specific linear models. The arms are divided in clusters, with the cluster memberships being unknown to an algorithm.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Yichuan Deng , Michalis Mamakos , Zhao Song

We consider the adversarial linear contextual bandit problem, where the loss vectors are selected fully adversarially and the per-round action set (i.e. the context) is drawn from a fixed distribution. Existing methods for this problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Haolin Liu , Chen-Yu Wei , Julian Zimmert

We propose an estimator and confidence interval for computing the value of a policy from off-policy data in the contextual bandit setting. To this end we apply empirical likelihood techniques to formulate our estimator and confidence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Nikos Karampatziakis , John Langford , Paul Mineiro

We consider the problem of model selection for the general stochastic contextual bandits under the realizability assumption. We propose a successive refinement based algorithm called Adaptive Contextual Bandit ({\ttfamily ACB}), that works…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-21 Avishek Ghosh , Abishek Sankararaman , Kannan Ramchandran

Recent work shows that when contexts are drawn i.i.d., linear contextual bandits can be reduced to single-context linear bandits. This ``contexts are cheap" perspective is highly advantageous, as it allows for sharper finite-time analyses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Kaan Buyukkalayci , Osama Hanna , Christina Fragouli

Contextual bandit algorithms are applied in a wide range of domains, from advertising to recommender systems, from clinical trials to education. In many of these domains, malicious agents may have incentives to attack the bandit algorithm…

The Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) framework highlights the tension between acquiring new knowledge (Exploration) and leveraging available knowledge (Exploitation). In the classical MAB problem, a decision maker must choose an arm at each time…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-03 Nir Levine , Koby Crammer , Shie Mannor

We study offline data poisoning attacks in contextual bandits, a class of reinforcement learning problems with important applications in online recommendation and adaptive medical treatment, among others. We provide a general attack…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-27 Yuzhe Ma , Kwang-Sung Jun , Lihong Li , Xiaojin Zhu

We consider the problem of contextual multi-armed bandits in the setting of hypothesis transfer learning. That is, we assume having access to a previously learned model on an unobserved set of contexts, and we leverage it in order to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Steven Bilaj , Sofien Dhouib , Setareh Maghsudi

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-01 Parnian Kassraie , Andreas Krause

Contextual bandits can solve a huge range of real-world problems. However, current popular algorithms to solve them either rely on linear models, or unreliable uncertainty estimation in non-linear models, which are required to deal with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Adam Elwood , Marco Leonardi , Ashraf Mohamed , Alessandro Rozza

Contextual Bandits find important use cases in various real-life scenarios such as online advertising, recommendation systems, healthcare, etc. However, most of the algorithms use flat feature vectors to represent context whereas, in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-29 Kaushik Roy , Qi Zhang , Manas Gaur , Amit Sheth

This paper considers a contextual bandit problem involving multiple agents, where a learner sequentially observes the contexts and the agent's reported arms, and then selects the arm that maximizes the system's overall reward. Existing work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Arun Verma , Indrajit Saha , Makoto Yokoo , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

The Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit problem is a sequential decision-making problem in which an agent selects a set of arms on each round, observes feedback for each of these arms and aims to maximize a known reward function of the arms it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-17 Nadav Merlis , Shie Mannor

We study nonparametric contextual bandits under batch constraints, where the expected reward for each action is modeled as a smooth function of covariates, and the policy updates are made at the end of each batch of observations. We…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-06 Rong Jiang , Cong Ma

The growing interest in complex decision-making and language modeling problems highlights the importance of sample-efficient learning over very long horizons. This work takes a step in this direction by investigating contextual linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Yuzhen Qin , Yingcong Li , Fabio Pasqualetti , Maryam Fazel , Samet Oymak