Related papers: Fast Distributed Bandits for Online Recommendation…
A distributed algorithm performs local computations on pieces of input and communicates the results through given communication links. When processing a massive graph in a distributed algorithm, local outputs must be configured as a…
The design of personalized incentives or recommendations to improve user engagement is gaining prominence as digital platform providers continually emerge. We propose a multi-armed bandit framework for matching incentives to users, whose…
Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the strategy deployed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. Further, often we have only partial information on the state of the system. We study the…
This paper introduces a novel multi-armed bandits framework, termed Contextual Restless Bandits (CRB), for complex online decision-making. This CRB framework incorporates the core features of contextual bandits and restless bandits, so that…
We introduce a Multi-User Contextual Cascading Bandit model, a new combinatorial bandit framework that captures realistic online advertising scenarios where multiple users interact with sequentially displayed items simultaneously. Unlike…
Bandit learning has been an increasingly popular design choice for recommender system. Despite the strong interest in bandit learning from the community, there remains multiple bottlenecks that prevent many bandit learning approaches from…
Standard contextual bandit problem assumes that all the relevant contexts are observed before the algorithm chooses an arm. This modeling paradigm, while useful, often falls short when dealing with problems in which valuable additional…
Information is often stored in a distributed and proprietary form, and agents who own information are often self-interested and require incentives to reveal their information. Suitable mechanisms are required to elicit and aggregate such…
Exposure bias is a well-known issue in recommender systems where items and suppliers are not equally represented in the recommendation results. This bias becomes particularly problematic over time as a few items are repeatedly…
Contextual bandit algorithms are extremely popular and widely used in recommendation systems to provide online personalised recommendations. A recurrent assumption is the stationarity of the reward function, which is rather unrealistic in…
We propose an extensible deep learning method that uses reinforcement learning to train neural networks for offline ranking in information retrieval (IR). We call our method BanditRank as it treats ranking as a contextual bandit problem. In…
We develop a novel latent-bandit algorithm for tackling the cold-start problem for new users joining a recommender system. This new algorithm significantly outperforms the state of the art, simultaneously achieving both higher accuracy and…
High-quality recommender systems ought to deliver both innovative and relevant content through effective and exploratory interactions with users. Yet, supervised learning-based neural networks, which form the backbone of many existing…
In many digital contexts such as online news and e-tailing with many new users and items, recommendation systems face several challenges: i) how to make initial recommendations to users with little or no response history (i.e., cold-start…
To address the contextual bandit problem, we propose an online random forest algorithm. The analysis of the proposed algorithm is based on the sample complexity needed to find the optimal decision stump. Then, the decision stumps are…
A common task for recommender systems is to build a pro le of the interests of a user from items in their browsing history and later to recommend items to the user from the same catalog. The users' behavior consists of two parts: the…
Contextual multi-armed bandits are a popular choice to model sequential decision-making. E.g., in a healthcare application we may perform various tests to asses a patient condition (exploration) and then decide on the best treatment to give…
Contextual bandit algorithms have transformed modern experimentation by enabling real-time adaptation for personalized treatment and efficient use of data. Yet these advantages create challenges for statistical inference due to adaptivity.…
In this paper, we study a cold-start problem in recommendation systems where we have completely new users entered the systems. There is not any interaction or feedback of the new users with the systems previoustly, thus no ratings are…
A fundamental challenge in contextual bandits is to develop flexible, general-purpose algorithms with computational requirements no worse than classical supervised learning tasks such as classification and regression. Algorithms based on…