Related papers: Safe Exploration for Optimizing Contextual Bandits
Safety is a desirable property that can immensely increase the applicability of learning algorithms in real-world decision-making problems. It is much easier for a company to deploy an algorithm that is safe, i.e., guaranteed to perform at…
Conversational recommender systems proactively query users with relevant "key terms" and leverage the feedback to elicit users' preferences for personalized recommendations. Conversational contextual bandits, a prevalent approach in this…
Motivated by problems of learning to rank long item sequences, we introduce a variant of the cascading bandit model that considers flexible length sequences with varying rewards and losses. We formulate two generative models for this…
We introduce a latency-aware contextual bandit framework that generalizes the standard contextual bandit problem, where the learner adaptively selects arms and switches decision sets under action delays. In this setting, the learner…
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…
We study linear contextual bandits in the misspecified setting, where the expected reward function can be approximated by a linear function class up to a bounded misspecification level $\zeta>0$. We propose an algorithm based on a novel…
Contextual bandits with linear payoffs, which are also known as linear bandits, provide a powerful alternative for solving practical problems of sequential decisions, e.g., online advertisements. In the era of big data, contextual data…
We develop a learning principle and an efficient algorithm for batch learning from logged bandit feedback. This learning setting is ubiquitous in online systems (e.g., ad placement, web search, recommendation), where an algorithm makes a…
Contextual multi-armed bandit problems arise frequently in important industrial applications. Existing solutions model the context either linearly, which enables uncertainty driven (principled) exploration, or non-linearly, by using…
The contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is crucial in sequential decision-making. A line of research, known as online clustering of bandits, extends contextual MAB by grouping similar users into clusters, utilizing shared features…
In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, instance-dependent algorithms attain improved performance on "easy" problems with a gap between the best and second-best arm. Are similar guarantees possible for contextual bandits? While…
Bandit algorithms sequentially accumulate data using adaptive sampling policies, offering flexibility for real-world applications. However, excessive sampling can be costly, motivating the devolopment of early stopping methods and reliable…
Modern systems, such as digital platforms and service systems, increasingly rely on contextual bandits for online decision-making; however, their deployment can inadvertently create unfair exposure among arms, undermining long-term platform…
Active learning methods have shown great promise in reducing the number of samples necessary for learning. As automated learning systems are adopted into real-time, real-world decision-making pipelines, it is increasingly important that…
This paper introduces a novel contextual bandit algorithm for personalized pricing under utility fairness constraints in scenarios with uncertain demand, achieving an optimal regret upper bound. Our approach, which incorporates dynamic…
In this paper, we address the contextual dueling bandit problem by proposing variance-aware algorithms that leverage neural networks to approximate nonlinear utility functions. Our approach employs a \textit{variance-aware exploration…
Contextual bandit algorithms are ubiquitous tools for active sequential experimentation in healthcare and the tech industry. They involve online learning algorithms that adaptively learn policies over time to map observed contexts $X_t$ to…
We study methods for efficiently aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences given budgeted online feedback. We first formulate the LLM alignment problem in the frame of contextual dueling bandits. This formulation,…
Solving a linear system $Ax=b$ is a fundamental scientific computing primitive for which numerous solvers and preconditioners have been developed. These come with parameters whose optimal values depend on the system being solved and are…
To address the contextual bandit problem, we propose an online random forest algorithm. The analysis of the proposed algorithm is based on the sample complexity needed to find the optimal decision stump. Then, the decision stumps are…