Related papers: Tractable contextual bandits beyond realizability
We propose an algorithm for non-stationary kernel bandits that does not require prior knowledge of the degree of non-stationarity. The algorithm follows randomized strategies obtained by solving optimization problems that balance…
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…
The standard contextual bandit framework assumes fully observable and actionable contexts. In this work, we consider a new bandit setting with partially observable, correlated contexts and linear payoffs, motivated by the applications in…
Computing expected predictions of discriminative models is a fundamental task in machine learning that appears in many interesting applications such as fairness, handling missing values, and data analysis. Unfortunately, computing…
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 design and implement an adaptive experiment (a ``contextual bandit'') to learn a targeted treatment assignment policy, where the goal is to use a participant's survey responses to determine which charity to expose them to in a donation…
We consider the problem of contextual multi-armed bandits in the setting of hypothesis transfer learning. That is, we assume having access to a previously learned model on an unobserved set of contexts, and we leverage it in order to…
We propose feature perturbation, a simple yet effective exploration strategy for contextual bandits that injects randomness directly into feature inputs, instead of randomizing unknown parameters or adding noise to rewards. Remarkably, this…
Parametric, feature-based reward models are employed by a variety of algorithms in decision-making settings such as bandits and Markov decision processes (MDPs). The typical assumption under which the algorithms are analysed is…
We study a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, where at each time step, the player observes an independently sampled context that determines the arms' mean rewards. However, playing an arm blocks it (across all contexts) for a…
The contextual bandit problem, where agents arrive sequentially with personal contexts and the system adapts its arm allocation decisions accordingly, has recently garnered increasing attention for enabling more personalized outcomes.…
Thompson Sampling is one of the oldest heuristics for multi-armed bandit problems. It is a randomized algorithm based on Bayesian ideas, and has recently generated significant interest after several studies demonstrated it to have better…
In this paper, we revisit the regret minimization problem in sparse stochastic contextual linear bandits, where feature vectors may be of large dimension $d$, but where the reward function depends on a few, say $s_0\ll d$, of these features…
Reward-biased maximum likelihood estimation (RBMLE) is a classic principle in the adaptive control literature for tackling explore-exploit trade-offs. This paper studies the stochastic contextual bandit problem with general bounded reward…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a classical learning task that exemplifies the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. However, standard formulations do not take into account {\em risk}. In online decision making systems, risk is a…
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,…
The contextual bandit has been identified as a powerful framework to formulate the recommendation process as a sequential decision-making process, where each item is regarded as an arm and the objective is to minimize the regret of $T$…
Meta-learning is characterized by its ability to learn how to learn, enabling the adaptation of learning strategies across different tasks. Recent research introduced the Meta-Thompson Sampling (Meta-TS), which meta-learns an unknown prior…
We study contextual linear bandit problems under feature uncertainty, where the features are noisy and have missing entries. To address the challenges posed by this noise, we analyze Bayesian oracles given the observed noisy features. Our…
The contextual bandit literature has traditionally focused on algorithms that address the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. In particular, greedy algorithms that exploit current estimates without any exploration may be sub-optimal in…