Related papers: Learning to Rank in the Position Based Model with …
We study the problem of using causal models to improve the rate at which good interventions can be learned online in a stochastic environment. Our formalism combines multi-arm bandits and causal inference to model a novel type of bandit…
We study contextual bandit (CB) problems, where the user can sometimes respond with the best action in a given context. Such an interaction arises, for example, in text prediction or autocompletion settings, where a poor suggestion is…
We study the effect of persistence of engagement on learning in a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting. In advertising and recommendation systems, repetition effect includes a wear-in period, where the user's propensity to reward the…
A contextual bandit problem is studied in a highly non-stationary environment, which is ubiquitous in various recommender systems due to the time-varying interests of users. Two models with disjoint and hybrid payoffs are considered to…
We present an online tutoring system that learns to provide effective feedback to students after they answer questions incorrectly. Using data from one million students, the system learns which assistance action (e.g., one of multiple…
In this paper, we investigate the impact of context diversity on stochastic linear contextual bandits. As opposed to the previous view that contexts lead to more difficult bandit learning, we show that when the contexts are sufficiently…
Much of the recent literature on bandit learning focuses on algorithms that aim to converge on an optimal action. One shortcoming is that this orientation does not account for time sensitivity, which can play a crucial role when learning an…
Ranking is a key aspect of many applications, such as information retrieval, question answering, ad placement and recommender systems. Learning to rank has the goal of estimating a ranking model automatically from training data. In…
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…
Nowadays, recommender systems already impact almost every facet of peoples lives. To provide personalized high quality recommendation results, conventional systems usually train pointwise rankers to predict the absolute value of objectives…
Contextual bandit algorithms are commonly used in digital health to recommend personalized treatments. However, to ensure the effectiveness of the treatments, patients are often requested to take actions that have no immediate benefit to…
We study a strategic variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, which we coin the strategic click-bandit. This model is motivated by applications in online recommendation where the choice of recommended items depends on both the…
Motivated by applications such as online labor markets we consider a variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where we have a collection of arms representing strategic agents with different performance characteristics. The…
As cellular networks become denser, a scalable and dynamic tuning of wireless base station parameters can only be achieved through automated optimization. Although the contextual bandit framework arises as a natural candidate for such a…
Online learning to rank (OLTR) interactively learns to choose lists of items from a large collection based on certain click models that describe users' click behaviors. Most recent works for this problem focus on the stochastic environment…
Optimizing an interactive system against a predefined online metric is particularly challenging, when the metric is computed from user feedback such as clicks and payments. The key challenge is the counterfactual nature: in the case of Web…
Learning to Rank (LTR) from user interactions is challenging as user feedback often contains high levels of bias and noise. At the moment, two methodologies for dealing with bias prevail in the field of LTR: counterfactual methods that…
In today's business marketplace, many high-tech Internet enterprises constantly explore innovative ways to provide optimal online user experiences for gaining competitive advantages. The great needs of developing intelligent interactive…
We introduce a new stochastic multi-armed bandit setting where arms are grouped inside ``ordered'' categories. The motivating example comes from e-commerce, where a customer typically has a greater appetence for items of a specific…
We considered a novel practical problem of online learning with episodically revealed rewards, motivated by several real-world applications, where the contexts are nonstationary over different episodes and the reward feedbacks are not…