Related papers: Fast Approximate Bayesian Contextual Cold Start Le…

Cold-start personalization requires inferring user preferences through interaction when no user-specific historical data is available. The core challenge is a routing problem: each task admits dozens of preference dimensions, yet individual…

Personalized web services strive to adapt their services (advertisements, news articles, etc) to individual users by making use of both content and user information. Despite a few recent advances, this problem remains challenging for at…

An emerging line of work has shown that machine-learned predictions are useful to warm-start algorithms for discrete optimization problems, such as bipartite matching. Previous studies have shown time complexity bounds proportional to some…

Recommender systems trained in a continuous learning fashion are plagued by the feedback loop problem, also known as algorithmic bias. This causes a newly trained model to act greedily and favor items that have already been engaged by…

We introduce a latency-aware contextual bandit framework that generalizes the standard contextual bandit problem, where the learner adaptively selects arms and switches decision sets under action delays. In this setting, the learner…

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…

One of the most challenging recommendation tasks is recommending to a new, previously unseen user. This is known as the 'user cold start' problem. Assuming certain features or attributes of users are known, one approach for handling new…

Contextual bandit algorithms provide principled online learning solutions to balance the exploitation-exploration trade-off in various applications such as recommender systems. However, the learning speed of the traditional contextual…

For tackling the well known cold-start user problem in model-based recommender systems, one approach is to recommend a few items to a cold-start user and use the feedback to learn a profile. The learned profile can then be used to make good…

Contextual Bandit (CB) algorithms are widely adopted for personalized recommendations but often struggle in dynamic environments typical of fantasy sports, where rapid changes in user behavior and dramatic shifts in reward distributions due…

Multifidelity approximation is an important technique in scientific computation and simulation. In this paper, we introduce a bandit-learning approach for leveraging data of varying fidelities to achieve precise estimates of the parameters…

Many models of interest in the natural and social sciences have no closed-form likelihood function, which means that they cannot be treated using the usual techniques of statistical inference. In the case where such models can be…

We investigate a novel cluster-of-bandit algorithm CAB for collaborative recommendation tasks that implements the underlying feedback sharing mechanism by estimating the neighborhood of users in a context-dependent manner. CAB makes sharp…

Active preference learning offers an efficient approach to modeling preferences, but it is hindered by the cold-start problem, which leads to a marked decline in performance when no initial labeled data are available. While cold-start…

Contextual bandit algorithms -- a class of multi-armed bandit algorithms that exploit the contextual information -- have been shown to be effective in solving sequential decision making problems under uncertainty. A common assumption…

A key challenge in reward learning from human input is that desired agent behavior often changes based on context. For example, a robot must adapt to avoid a stove once it becomes hot. We observe that while high-level preferences (e.g.,…

Cold-start is a very common and still open problem in the Recommender Systems literature. Since cold start items do not have any interaction, collaborative algorithms are not applicable. One of the main strategies is to use pure or hybrid…

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…

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a popular likelihood-free inference method for models with intractable likelihood functions. As ABC methods usually rely on comparing summary statistics of observed and simulated data, the choice of…

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) performs statistical inference for otherwise intractable probability models by accepting parameter proposals when corresponding simulated datasets are sufficiently close to the observations. Producing…