Related papers: Safe Exploration for Optimizing Contextual Bandits
Automated decision-making algorithms drive applications such as recommendation systems and search engines. These algorithms often rely on off-policy contextual bandits or off-policy learning (OPL). Conventionally, OPL selects actions that…
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…
We consider a novel variant of the contextual bandit problem (i.e., the multi-armed bandit with side-information, or context, available to a decision-maker) where the reward associated with each context-based decision may not always be…
Applications and systems are constantly faced with decisions that require picking from a set of actions based on contextual information. Reinforcement-based learning algorithms such as contextual bandits can be very effective in these…
Reinforcement learning is a widely used approach to autonomous navigation, showing potential in various tasks and robotic setups. Still, it often struggles to reach distant goals when safety constraints are imposed (e.g., the wheeled robot…
We study contextual bandits with ancillary constraints on resources, which are common in real-world applications such as choosing ads or dynamic pricing of items. We design the first algorithm for solving these problems that handles…
Contextual bandit learning is an increasingly popular approach to optimizing recommender systems via user feedback, but can be slow to converge in practice due to the need for exploring a large feature space. In this paper, we propose a…
We study contextual bandits in the stochastic i.i.d.\ setting, where a learner observes contexts drawn from an unknown distribution, selects actions from a finite set $A$, and aims to identify an approximately optimal policy from a given…
Reinforcement learning addresses the dilemma between exploration to find profitable actions and exploitation to act according to the best observations already made. Bandit problems are one such class of problems in stateless environments…
We introduce a unified framework for contextual and causal Bayesian optimisation, which aims to design intervention policies maximising the expectation of a target variable. Our approach leverages both observed contextual information and…
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…
Evaluating the safety of frontier AI systems is an increasingly important concern, helping to measure the capabilities of such models and identify risks before deployment. However, it has been recognised that if AI agents are aware that…
Numerous heuristics and advanced approaches have been proposed for exploration in different settings for deep reinforcement learning. Noise-based exploration generally fares well with dense-shaped rewards and bonus-based exploration with…
A fundamental challenge in contextual bandits is to develop flexible, general-purpose algorithms with computational requirements no worse than classical supervised learning tasks such as classification and regression. Algorithms based on…
This paper addresses the poor finite-horizon performance of existing online \emph{restless bandit} (RB) algorithms, which stems from the prohibitive sample complexity of learning a full \emph{Markov decision process} (MDP) for each agent.…
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…
Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving real-world decision making problems. In practice, collecting a contextual bandit's feedback from different domains may involve different costs. For example, measuring drug reaction from…
Contextual bandits with average-case statistical guarantees are inadequate in risk-averse situations because they might trade off degraded worst-case behaviour for better average performance. Designing a risk-averse contextual bandit is…
We propose the first contextual bandit algorithm that is parameter-free, efficient, and optimal in terms of dynamic regret. Specifically, our algorithm achieves dynamic regret $\mathcal{O}(\min\{\sqrt{ST},…
In this paper, we propose and study opportunistic contextual bandits - a special case of contextual bandits where the exploration cost varies under different environmental conditions, such as network load or return variation in…