Related papers: Safe Exploration for Optimizing Contextual Bandits
Current AI-powered code assistance tools often struggle with poorly-defined problem statements that lack sufficient task context and requirements specification. Recent analysis of software engineering agents reveals that failures on such…
Solutions to address the periodic review inventory control problem with nonstationary random demand, lost sales, and stochastic vendor lead times typically involve making strong assumptions on the dynamics for either approximation or…
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…
Intelligent agents equipped with causal knowledge can optimize their action spaces to avoid unnecessary exploration. The structural causal bandit framework provides a graphical characterization for identifying actions that are unable to…
We consider the neural contextual bandit problem. In contrast to the existing work which primarily focuses on ReLU neural nets, we consider a general set of smooth activation functions. Under this more general setting, (i) we derive…
Over the past decade, contextual bandit algorithms have been gaining in popularity due to their effectiveness and flexibility in solving sequential decision problems---from online advertising and finance to clinical trial design and…
The contextual bandit framework is widely used to solve sequential optimization problems where the reward of each decision depends on auxiliary context variables. In settings such as medicine, business, and engineering, the decision maker…
Exploration policies in Bayesian bandits maximize the average reward over problem instances drawn from some distribution $\mathcal{P}$. In this work, we learn such policies for an unknown distribution $\mathcal{P}$ using samples from…
Conversational contextual bandits elicit user preferences by occasionally querying for explicit feedback on key-terms to accelerate learning. However, there are aspects of existing approaches which limit their performance. First,…
A recent body of work addresses safety constraints in explore-and-exploit systems. Such constraints arise where, for example, exploration is carried out by individuals whose welfare should be balanced with overall welfare. In this paper, we…
PAC-Bayes has recently re-emerged as an effective theory with which one can derive principled learning algorithms with tight performance guarantees. However, applications of PAC-Bayes to bandit problems are relatively rare, which is a great…
We investigate contextual bandits in the presence of side-observations across arms in order to design recommendation algorithms for users connected via social networks. Users in social networks respond to their friends' activity, and hence…
The contextual duelling bandit problem models adaptive recommender systems, where the algorithm presents a set of items to the user, and the user's choice reveals their preference. This setup is well suited for implicit choices users make…
We study contextual bandits in the presence of a stage-wise constraint when the constraint must be satisfied both with high probability and in expectation. We start with the linear case where both the reward function and the stage-wise…
As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly popular, there is a growing need to predict which out of a set of LLMs will yield a successful answer to a given query at low cost. This problem promises to become even more relevant as…
Causal knowledge can be used to support decision-making problems. This has been recognized in the causal bandits literature, where a causal (multi-armed) bandit is characterized by a causal graphical model and a target variable. The arms…
Contextual bandits are incredibly useful in many practical problems. We go one step further by devising a more realistic problem that combines: (1) contextual bandits with dense arm features, (2) non-linear reward functions, and (3) a…
In today's technology environment, information is abundant, dynamic, and heterogeneous in nature. Automated filtering and prioritization of information is based on the distinction between whether the information adds substantial value…
In this research, we investigate the high-dimensional linear contextual bandit problem where the number of features $p$ is greater than the budget $T$, or it may even be infinite. Differing from the majority of previous works in this field,…
Motivated by applications in online bidding and sleeping bandits, we examine the problem of contextual bandits with cross learning, where the learner observes the loss associated with the action across all possible contexts, not just the…