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In online learning, the data is provided in a sequential order, and the goal of the learner is to make online decisions to minimize overall regrets. This note is concerned with continuous-time models and algorithms for several online…
The design of personalized incentives or recommendations to improve user engagement is gaining prominence as digital platform providers continually emerge. We propose a multi-armed bandit framework for matching incentives to users, whose…
The contextual bandit has been identified as a powerful framework to formulate the recommendation process as a sequential decision-making process, where each item is regarded as an arm and the objective is to minimize the regret of $T$…
By leveraging the representation power of deep neural networks, neural upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms have shown success in contextual bandits. To further balance the exploration and exploitation, we propose…
The literature on bandit learning and regret analysis has focused on contexts where the goal is to converge on an optimal action in a manner that limits exploration costs. One shortcoming imposed by this orientation is that it does not…
The deployment of Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) has become commonplace in many economic applications. However, regret guarantees for even state-of-the-art linear bandit algorithms (such as Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty Linear bandit…
This paper considers the contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) problem with fairness and privacy guarantees in a federated environment. We consider merit-based exposure as the desired fair outcome, which provides exposure to each action in…
Large language models (LLMs) are typically governed by post-training alignment (e.g., RLHF or DPO), which yields a largely static policy during deployment and inference. However, real-world safety is a full-lifecycle problem: static…
In this paper, we propose a cost-aware cascading bandits model, a new variant of multi-armed ban- dits with cascading feedback, by considering the random cost of pulling arms. In each step, the learning agent chooses an ordered list of…
We study a variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem in which the rewards are corrupted. In this framework, motivated by privacy preservation in online recommender systems, the goal is to maximize the sum of the…
We consider stochastic multi-armed bandit problems where the expected reward is a Lipschitz function of the arm, and where the set of arms is either discrete or continuous. For discrete Lipschitz bandits, we derive asymptotic problem…
Classic contextual bandit algorithms for linear models, such as LinUCB, assume that the reward distribution for an arm is modeled by a stationary linear regression. When the linear regression model is non-stationary over time, the regret of…
This paper investigates the robustness of causal bandits (CBs) in the face of temporal model fluctuations. This setting deviates from the existing literature's widely-adopted assumption of constant causal models. The focus is on causal…
Many applications require a learner to make sequential decisions given uncertainty regarding both the system's payoff function and safety constraints. In safety-critical systems, it is paramount that the learner's actions do not violate the…
Combinatorial multi-armed bandits provide a fundamental online decision-making environment where a decision-maker interacts with an environment across $T$ time steps, each time selecting an action and learning the cost of that action. The…
In this paper we propose a novel experimental design-based algorithm to minimize regret in online stochastic linear and combinatorial bandits. While existing literature tends to focus on optimism-based algorithms--which have been shown to…
The Indexed Minimum Empirical Divergence (IMED) algorithm is a highly effective approach that offers a stronger theoretical guarantee of the asymptotic optimality compared to the Kullback--Leibler Upper Confidence Bound (KL-UCB) algorithm…
The contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a widely used framework for problems requiring sequential decision-making under uncertainty, such as recommendation systems. In applications involving a large number of users, the performance of…
A standard assumption in contextual multi-arm bandit is that the true context is perfectly known before arm selection. Nonetheless, in many practical applications (e.g., cloud resource management), prior to arm selection, the context…
We tackle the problem of online reward maximisation over a large finite set of actions described by their contexts. We focus on the case when the number of actions is too big to sample all of them even once. However we assume that we have…