Related papers: Safe Exploration for Optimizing Contextual Bandits

In the reinforcement learning literature, there are many algorithms developed for either Contextual Bandit (CB) or Markov Decision Processes (MDP) environments. However, when deploying reinforcement learning algorithms in the real world,…

We consider off-policy selection and learning in contextual bandits, where the learner aims to select or train a reward-maximizing policy using data collected by a fixed behavior policy. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we propose a…

We study a variant of causal contextual bandits where the context is chosen based on an initial intervention chosen by the learner. At the beginning of each round, the learner selects an initial action, depending on which a stochastic…

This paper is a scoping study to identify current methods used in handling sparse data with contextual bandits in web settings. The area is highly current and state of the art methods are identified. The years 2017-2020 are investigated,…

We study a nonparametric contextual bandit problem where the expected reward functions belong to a H\"older class with smoothness parameter $\beta$. We show how this interpolates between two extremes that were previously studied in…

Stochastic linear contextual bandit algorithms have substantial applications in practice, such as recommender systems, online advertising, clinical trials, etc. Recent works show that optimal bandit algorithms are vulnerable to adversarial…

Contextual bandits are widely-used in the study of learning-based control policies for finite action spaces. While the problem is well-studied for bandits with perfectly observed context vectors, little is known about the case of…

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 this paper, we address the stochastic contextual linear bandit problem, where a decision maker is provided a context (a random set of actions drawn from a distribution). The expected reward of each action is specified by the inner…

Recent advances in contextual bandit optimization and reinforcement learning have garnered interest in applying these methods to real-world sequential decision making problems. Real-world applications frequently have constraints with…

Contextual policy search allows adapting robotic movement primitives to different situations. For instance, a locomotion primitive might be adapted to different terrain inclinations or desired walking speeds. Such an adaptation is often…

In this paper, we study utilizing neural networks for the exploitation and exploration of contextual multi-armed bandits. Contextual multi-armed bandits have been studied for decades with various applications. To solve the…

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…

In this work, we propose a novel method for training neural networks to perform single-document extractive summarization without heuristically-generated extractive labels. We call our approach BanditSum as it treats extractive summarization…

Exposure bias is a well-known issue in recommender systems where items and suppliers are not equally represented in the recommendation results. This is especially problematic when bias is amplified over time as a few items (e.g., popular…

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…

The contextual bandit problem, which is a type of reinforcement learning tasks, provides an effective framework for solving challenges in recommendation systems, such as satisfying real-time requirements, enabling personalization,…

Contextual multi-armed bandits are a popular choice to model sequential decision-making. E.g., in a healthcare application we may perform various tests to asses a patient condition (exploration) and then decide on the best treatment to give…

In stochastic contextual bandits, an agent sequentially makes actions from a time-dependent action set based on past experience to minimize the cumulative regret. Like many other machine learning algorithms, the performance of bandits…

Multi-armed bandit algorithms have become a reference solution for handling the explore/exploit dilemma in recommender systems, and many other important real-world problems, such as display advertisement. However, such algorithms usually…