Related papers: Model Selection in Contextual Stochastic Bandit Pr…
We consider model selection in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. Given a set of base learning algorithms, an effective model selection strategy adapts to the best learning algorithm in an online fashion. We show that by…
We introduce the problem of model selection for contextual bandits, where a learner must adapt to the complexity of the optimal policy while balancing exploration and exploitation. Our main result is a new model selection guarantee for…
We consider model selection for sequential decision making in stochastic environments with bandit feedback, where a meta-learner has at its disposal a pool of base learners, and decides on the fly which action to take based on the policies…
Online model selection in Bayesian bandits raises a fundamental exploration challenge: When an environment instance is sampled from a prior distribution, how can we design an adaptive strategy that explores multiple bandit learners and…
Model selection in supervised learning provides costless guarantees as if the model that best balances bias and variance was known a priori. We study the feasibility of similar guarantees for cumulative regret minimization in the stochastic…
We study the problem of model selection in bandit scenarios in the presence of nested policy classes, with the goal of obtaining simultaneous adversarial and stochastic ("best of both worlds") high-probability regret guarantees. Our…
We propose a simple model selection approach for algorithms in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. As opposed to prior work that (implicitly) assumes knowledge of the optimal regret, we only require that each base…
Designing efficient general-purpose contextual bandit algorithms that work with large -- or even continuous -- action spaces would facilitate application to important scenarios such as information retrieval, recommendation systems, and…
We consider the model selection task in the stochastic contextual bandit setting. Suppose we are given a collection of base contextual bandit algorithms. We provide a master algorithm that combines them and achieves the same performance, up…
We consider the problem of stochastic $K$-armed dueling bandit in the contextual setting, where at each round the learner is presented with a context set of $K$ items, each represented by a $d$-dimensional feature vector, and the goal of…
We introduce a new stochastic smoothing perspective to study adversarial contextual bandit problems. We propose a general algorithm template that represents random perturbation based algorithms and identify several perturbation…
Model selection in contextual bandits is an important complementary problem to regret minimization with respect to a fixed model class. We consider the simplest non-trivial instance of model-selection: distinguishing a simple multi-armed…
We initiate the study of learning in contextual bandits with the help of loss predictors. The main question we address is whether one can improve over the minimax regret $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ for learning over $T$ rounds, when the total…
Most contextual bandit algorithms minimize regret against the best fixed policy, a questionable benchmark for non-stationary environments that are ubiquitous in applications. In this work, we develop several efficient contextual bandit…
We consider the contextual bandit problem where at each time, the agent only has access to a noisy version of the context and the error variance (or an estimator of this variance). This setting is motivated by a wide range of applications…
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…
We develop the first general semi-bandit algorithm that simultaneously achieves $\mathcal{O}(\log T)$ regret for stochastic environments and $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret for adversarial environments without knowledge of the regime or the…
We study the problem of meta-learning several contextual stochastic bandits tasks by leveraging their concentration around a low-dimensional affine subspace, which we learn via online principal component analysis to reduce the expected…
We consider a sequential assortment selection problem where the user choice is given by a multinomial logit (MNL) choice model whose parameters are unknown. In each period, the learning agent observes a $d$-dimensional contextual…
We consider the stochastic linear (multi-armed) contextual bandit problem with the possibility of hidden simple multi-armed bandit structure in which the rewards are independent of the contextual information. Algorithms that are designed…