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Standard approaches to decision-making under uncertainty focus on sequential exploration of the space of decisions. However, \textit{simultaneously} proposing a batch of decisions, which leverages available resources for parallel…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-07 Jeffrey Chan , Aldo Pacchiano , Nilesh Tripuraneni , Yun S. Song , Peter Bartlett , Michael I. Jordan

Contextual bandits serve as a fundamental model for many sequential decision making tasks. The most popular theoretically justified approaches are based on the optimism principle. While these algorithms can be practical, they are known to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-17 Botao Hao , Tor Lattimore , Csaba Szepesvari

Contextual bandits are widely-used in the study of learning-based control policies for finite action spaces. While the problem is well-studied for bandits with perfectly observed context vectors, little is known about the case of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-03 Hongju Park , Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh

For a real-world decision-making problem, the reward function often needs to be engineered or learned. A popular approach is to utilize human feedback to learn a reward function for training. The most straightforward way to do so is to ask…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Xiang Ji , Huazheng Wang , Minshuo Chen , Tuo Zhao , Mengdi Wang

We consider the problem of contextual bandits and imitation learning, where the learner lacks direct knowledge of the executed action's reward. Instead, the learner can actively query an expert at each round to compare two actions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan , Wen Sun , Runzhe Wu

Contextual Bandits is one of the widely popular techniques used in applications such as personalization, recommendation systems, mobile health, causal marketing etc . As a dynamic approach, it can be more efficient than standard A/B testing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Praneet Dutta , Joe Cheuk , Jonathan S Kim , Massimo Mascaro

Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving real-world decision making problems. In practice, collecting a contextual bandit's feedback from different domains may involve different costs. For example, measuring drug reaction from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Ziyan Wang , Xiaoming Huo , Hao Wang

Contextual bandit is a general framework for online learning in sequential decision-making problems that has found application in a wide range of domains, including recommendation systems, online advertising, and clinical trials. A critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-24 Evrard Garcelon , Vianney Perchet , Matteo Pirotta

We study contextual bandits in the stochastic i.i.d.\ setting, where a learner observes contexts drawn from an unknown distribution, selects actions from a finite set $A$, and aims to identify an approximately optimal policy from a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Liad Erez , Fan Chen , Alon Cohen , Tomer Koren , Yishay Mansour , Shay Moran , Alexander Rakhlin

We consider off-policy selection and learning in contextual bandits, where the learner aims to select or train a reward-maximizing policy using data collected by a fixed behavior policy. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 J. Jon Ryu , Jeongyeol Kwon , Benjamin Koppe , Kwang-Sung Jun

Real-world applications of contextual bandits often exhibit non-stationarity due to seasonality, serendipity, and evolving social trends. While a number of non-stationary contextual bandit learning algorithms have been proposed in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Zheqing Zhu , Yueyang Liu , Xu Kuang , Benjamin Van Roy

Efficient online decision-making in contextual bandits is challenging, as methods without informative priors often suffer from computational or statistical inefficiencies. In this work, we leverage pre-trained diffusion models as expressive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Imad Aouali

Recent advances in contextual bandit optimization and reinforcement learning have garnered interest in applying these methods to real-world sequential decision making problems. Real-world applications frequently have constraints with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Samuel Daulton , Shaun Singh , Vashist Avadhanula , Drew Dimmery , Eytan Bakshy

We study the fundamental limits of learning in contextual bandits, where a learner's rewards depend on their actions and a known context, which extends the canonical multi-armed bandit to the case where side-information is available. We are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-13 Moise Blanchard , Steve Hanneke , Patrick Jaillet

Stochastic linear contextual bandit algorithms have substantial applications in practice, such as recommender systems, online advertising, clinical trials, etc. Recent works show that optimal bandit algorithms are vulnerable to adversarial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-31 Qin Ding , Cho-Jui Hsieh , James Sharpnack

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Weiqiang Wu , Jing Yang , Cong Shen

In many biomedical, science, and engineering problems, one must sequentially decide which action to take next so as to maximize rewards. One general class of algorithms for optimizing interactions with the world, while simultaneously…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-05 Iñigo Urteaga , Chris H. Wiggins

We investigate the feasibility of learning from a mix of both fully-labeled supervised data and contextual bandit data. We specifically consider settings in which the underlying learning signal may be different between these two data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Chicheng Zhang , Alekh Agarwal , Hal Daumé , John Langford , Sahand N Negahban

In this paper, we consider online learning in generalized linear contextual bandits where rewards are not immediately observed. Instead, rewards are available to the decision-maker only after some delay, which is unknown and stochastic. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-12 Jose Blanchet , Renyuan Xu , Zhengyuan Zhou

We consider a novel variant of the contextual bandit problem (i.e., the multi-armed bandit with side-information, or context, available to a decision-maker) where the context used at each decision may be corrupted ("useless context"). This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Djallel Bouneffouf