Related papers: Statistical Inference for Online Decision-Making: …
Contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms have been shown promising for maximizing cumulative rewards in sequential decision tasks such as news article recommendation systems, web page ad placement algorithms, and mobile health.…
We study the task of online learning in the presence of Massart noise. Instead of assuming that the online adversary chooses an arbitrary sequence of labels, we assume that the context $\mathbf{x}$ is selected adversarially but the label…
Solutions to address the periodic review inventory control problem with nonstationary random demand, lost sales, and stochastic vendor lead times typically involve making strong assumptions on the dynamics for either approximation or…
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…
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 revisit the finite-armed linear bandit model by Nelson et al. (2022), where contexts and rewards are governed by a finite hidden Markov chain. Nelson et al. (2022) approach this model by a reduction to linear contextual bandits; but to…
We study constrained contextual bandits (CCB) with adversarially chosen contexts, where each action yields a random reward and incurs a random cost. We adopt the standard realizability assumption: conditioned on the observed context,…
In this work, we first show that the problem of parameter identification is often ill-conditioned and lacks the persistence of excitation required for the convergence of online learning schemes. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the…
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 bandits are widely used in industrial personalization systems. These online learning frameworks learn a treatment assignment policy in the presence of treatment effects that vary with the observed contextual features of the…
We study the Inverse Contextual Bandit (ICB) problem, in which a learner seeks to optimize a policy while an observer, who cannot access the learner's rewards and only observes actions, aims to recover the underlying problem parameters.…
This paper studies semiparametric contextual bandits, a generalization of the linear stochastic bandit problem where the reward for an action is modeled as a linear function of known action features confounded by an non-linear…
In decision-making problems such as the multi-armed bandit, an agent learns sequentially by optimizing a certain feedback. While the mean reward criterion has been extensively studied, other measures that reflect an aversion to adverse…
In the fixed budget thresholding bandit problem, an algorithm sequentially allocates a budgeted number of samples to different distributions. It then predicts whether the mean of each distribution is larger or lower than a given threshold.…
The statistical framework of Generalized Linear Models (GLM) can be applied to sequential problems involving categorical or ordinal rewards associated, for instance, with clicks, likes or ratings. In the example of binary rewards, logistic…
Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…
We propose an online inference method for censored quantile regression with streaming data sets. A key strategy is to approximate the martingale-based unsmooth objective function with a quadratic loss function involving a well-justified…
Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…
We consider a general online resource allocation model with bandit feedback and time-varying demands. While online resource allocation has been well studied in the literature, most existing works make the strong assumption that the demand…
Contextual bandit and reinforcement learning algorithms have been successfully used in various interactive learning systems such as online advertising, recommender systems, and dynamic pricing. However, they have yet to be widely adopted in…