Related papers: Greedy Bandits with Sampled Context
In production systems, contextual bandit approaches often rely on direct reward models that take both action and context as input. However, these models can suffer from confounding, making it difficult to isolate the effect of the action…
In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective…
In this paper we consider the adversarial contextual bandit problem in metric spaces. The paper "Nearest neighbour with bandit feedback" tackled this problem but when there are many contexts near the decision boundary of the comparator…
Focusing on Random Forests, we propose a multi-armed contextual bandit recommendation framework for feature-based selection of a single shallow tree of the learned ensemble. The trained system, which works on top of the Random Forest,…
Motivated by online recommendation and advertising systems, we consider a causal model for stochastic contextual bandits with a latent low-dimensional confounder. In our model, there are $L$ observed contexts and $K$ arms of the bandit. The…
In this work we consider adversarial contextual bandits with risk constraints. At each round, nature prepares a context, a cost for each arm, and additionally a risk for each arm. The learner leverages the context to pull an arm and then…
Non-stationary multi-armed bandits (NS-MABs) model sequential decision-making problems in which the expected rewards of a set of actions, a.k.a.~arms, evolve over time. In this paper, we fill a gap in the literature by providing a novel…
Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have made significant strides in performance on applications such as Go and Atari games. However, developing practical methods to balance exploration and exploitation in complex domains remains…
Contextual linear bandits is a rich and theoretically important model that has many practical applications. Recently, this setup gained a lot of interest in applications over wireless where communication constraints can be a performance…
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…
Reinforcement learning addresses the dilemma between exploration to find profitable actions and exploitation to act according to the best observations already made. Bandit problems are one such class of problems in stateless environments…
Multi-dimensional online decision making plays a crucial role in many real applications such as online recommendation and digital marketing. In these problems, a decision at each time is a combination of choices from different types of…
Motivated by problems of learning to rank long item sequences, we introduce a variant of the cascading bandit model that considers flexible length sequences with varying rewards and losses. We formulate two generative models for this…
In recent years, instructional practices in Operations Research (OR), Management Science (MS), and Analytics have increasingly shifted toward digital environments, where large and diverse groups of learners make it difficult to provide…
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…
We study how representation learning can improve the learning efficiency of contextual bandit problems. We study the setting where we play T contextual linear bandits with dimension d simultaneously, and these T bandit tasks collectively…
We propose a novel framework for structured bandits, which we call an influence diagram bandit. Our framework captures complex statistical dependencies between actions, latent variables, and observations; and thus unifies and extends many…
We consider the combinatorial volatile Gaussian process (GP) semi-bandit problem. Each round, an agent is provided a set of available base arms and must select a subset of them to maximize the long-term cumulative reward. We study the…
We study nonparametric contextual bandits under batch constraints, where the expected reward for each action is modeled as a smooth function of covariates, and the policy updates are made at the end of each batch of observations. We…
We consider a Bayesian budgeted multi-armed bandit problem, in which each arm consumes a different amount of resources when selected and there is a budget constraint on the total amount of resources that can be used. Budgeted Thompson…