Related papers: Offline Contextual Bandits with Overparameterized …
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…
This paper studies the off-policy evaluation problem, where one aims to estimate the value of a target policy based on a sample of observations collected by another policy. We first consider the multi-armed bandit case, establish a minimax…
A central problem in sequential decision making is to develop algorithms that are practical and computationally efficient, yet support the use of flexible, general-purpose models. Focusing on the contextual bandit problem, recent progress…
We address policy learning with logged data in contextual bandits. Current offline-policy learning algorithms are mostly based on inverse propensity score (IPS) weighting requiring the logging policy to have \emph{full support} i.e. a…
Offline policy optimization could have a large impact on many real-world decision-making problems, as online learning may be infeasible in many applications. Importance sampling and its variants are a commonly used type of estimator in…
Contextual bandits have the same exploration-exploitation trade-off as standard multi-armed bandits. On adding positive externalities that decay with time, this problem becomes much more difficult as wrong decisions at the start are hard to…
A major research direction in contextual bandits is to develop algorithms that are computationally efficient, yet support flexible, general-purpose function approximation. Algorithms based on modeling rewards have shown strong empirical…
We study the off-policy evaluation problem---estimating the value of a target policy using data collected by another policy---under the contextual bandit model. We consider the general (agnostic) setting without access to a consistent model…
Thanks to the power of representation learning, neural contextual bandit algorithms demonstrate remarkable performance improvement against their classical counterparts. But because their exploration has to be performed in the entire neural…
The principle of optimism in the face of uncertainty is one of the most widely used and successful ideas in multi-armed bandits and reinforcement learning. However, existing optimistic algorithms (primarily UCB and its variants) often…
Contextual bandit algorithms often estimate reward models to inform decision-making. However, true rewards can contain action-independent redundancies that are not relevant for decision-making. We show it is more data-efficient to estimate…
We consider off-policy evaluation and optimization with continuous action spaces. We focus on observational data where the data collection policy is unknown and needs to be estimated. We take a semi-parametric approach where the value…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits has seen rapid adoption in real-world systems, since it enables offline evaluation of new policies using only historic log data. Unfortunately, when the number of actions is large, existing…
We propose the first boosting algorithm for off-policy learning from logged bandit feedback. Unlike existing boosting methods for supervised learning, our algorithm directly optimizes an estimate of the policy's expected reward. We analyze…
We study budget-constrained contextual bandits with adversarial contexts, where each action yields a random reward and incurs a random cost. We adopt the standard realizability assumption: conditioned on the observed context, rewards and…
Multi-armed bandit algorithms have become a reference solution for handling the explore/exploit dilemma in recommender systems, and many other important real-world problems, such as display advertisement. However, such algorithms usually…
Deep neural networks often contain far more parameters than training examples, yet they still manage to generalize well in practice. Classical complexity measures such as VC-dimension or PAC-Bayes bounds usually become vacuous in this…
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…
Traditional online learning models are typically initialized from scratch. By contrast, contemporary real-world applications often have access to historical datasets that can potentially enhanced the online learning processes. We study how…
Conservative Contextual Bandits (CCBs) address safety in sequential decision making by requiring that an agent's policy, along with minimizing regret, also satisfies a safety constraint: the performance is not worse than a baseline policy…