Related papers: Offline Contextual Bandits with Overparameterized …
For infinite action contextual bandits, smoothed regret and reduction to regression results in state-of-the-art online performance with computational cost independent of the action set: unfortunately, the resulting data exhaust does not…
There has been a growing interest in off-policy evaluation in the literature such as recommender systems and personalized medicine. We have so far seen significant progress in developing estimators aimed at accurately estimating the…
Bandit learning is characterized by the tension between long-term exploration and short-term exploitation. However, as has recently been noted, in settings in which the choices of the learning algorithm correspond to important decisions…
Evaluating the value of a hypothetical target policy with only a logged dataset is important but challenging. On the one hand, it brings opportunities for safe policy improvement under high-stakes scenarios like clinical guidelines. On the…
Taking advantage of contextual information can potentially boost the performance of recommender systems. In the era of big data, such side information often has several dimensions. Thus, developing decision-making algorithms to cope with…
In-context learning enables large language models (LLMs) to perform a variety of tasks, including learning to make reward-maximizing choices in simple bandit tasks. Given their potential use as (autonomous) decision-making agents, it is…
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…
Supervised imitation-based approaches are often favored over off-policy reinforcement learning approaches for learning policies offline, since their straightforward optimization objective makes them computationally efficient and stable to…
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 study two model selection settings in stochastic linear bandits (LB). In the first setting, which we refer to as feature selection, the expected reward of the LB problem is in the linear span of at least one of $M$ feature maps (models).…
In a sequential decision-making problem, off-policy evaluation estimates the expected cumulative reward of a target policy using logged trajectory data generated from a different behavior policy, without execution of the target policy.…
We develop confidence bounds that hold uniformly over time for off-policy evaluation in the contextual bandit setting. These confidence sequences are based on recent ideas from martingale analysis and are non-asymptotic, non-parametric, and…
This paper presents a new contextual bandit algorithm, NeuralBandit, which does not need hypothesis on stationarity of contexts and rewards. Several neural networks are trained to modelize the value of rewards knowing the context. Two…
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…
Traditional off-policy actor-critic Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms learn value functions of a single target policy. However, when value functions are updated to track the learned policy, they forget potentially useful information…
In this paper, we address the stochastic contextual linear bandit problem, where a decision maker is provided a context (a random set of actions drawn from a distribution). The expected reward of each action is specified by the inner…
Classic algorithms for stochastic bandits typically use hyperparameters that govern their critical properties such as the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Tuning these hyperparameters is a problem of great practical…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the value of a target policy from samples obtained via different policies. Recently, applying OPE methods for bandit problems has garnered attention. For the theoretical guarantees of…
Contextual dueling bandit is used to model the bandit problems, where a learner's goal is to find the best arm for a given context using observed noisy human preference feedback over the selected arms for the past contexts. However,…
We study linear contextual bandits in the misspecified setting, where the expected reward function can be approximated by a linear function class up to a bounded misspecification level $\zeta>0$. We propose an algorithm based on a novel…