Related papers: A New Bandit Setting Balancing Information from St…
We introduce the cram method as a general statistical framework for evaluating the final learned policy from a multi-armed contextual bandit algorithm, using the dataset generated by the same bandit algorithm. The proposed on-policy…
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…
The cooperative bandit problem is a multi-agent decision problem involving a group of agents that interact simultaneously with a multi-armed bandit, while communicating over a network with delays. The central idea in this problem is to…
Recent developments in digital platforms have highlighted the prevalence of open systems, where agents can arrive and depart over time. While bandit learning in open systems has recently received initial attention, existing work imposes…
Research on the multi-armed bandit problem has studied the trade-off of exploration and exploitation in depth. However, there are numerous applications where the cardinal absolute-valued feedback model (e.g. ratings from one to five) is not…
We study the problem of covert online decision-making in which an agent attempts to identify a parameter governing a system by probing the system while escaping detection from an adversary. The system is modeled as a Markov kernel whose…
We study decision making in environments where the reward is only partially observed, but can be modeled as a function of an action and an observed context. This setting, known as contextual bandits, encompasses a wide variety of…
An extension of the traditional two-armed bandit problem is considered, in which the decision maker has access to some side information before deciding which arm to pull. At each time t, before making a selection, the decision maker is able…
This paper is a scoping study to identify current methods used in handling sparse data with contextual bandits in web settings. The area is highly current and state of the art methods are identified. The years 2017-2020 are investigated,…
We study the offline contextual bandit problem, where we aim to acquire an optimal policy using observational data. However, this data usually contains two deficiencies: (i) some variables that confound actions are not observed, and (ii)…
In this work, we investigate the problem of adapting to the presence or absence of causal structure in multi-armed bandit problems. In addition to the usual reward signal, we assume the learner has access to additional variables, observed…
We study an online decision making problem where on each round a learner chooses a list of items based on some side information, receives a scalar feedback value for each individual item, and a reward that is linearly related to this…
A large number of statistical decision problems in the social sciences and beyond can be framed as a (contextual) multi-armed bandit problem. However, it is notoriously hard to develop and evaluate policies that tackle these types of…
This paper considers a contextual bandit problem involving multiple agents, where a learner sequentially observes the contexts and the agent's reported arms, and then selects the arm that maximizes the system's overall reward. Existing work…
Taking advantage of contextual information can potentially boost the performance of recommender systems. In the era of big data, such side information often has several dimensions. Thus, developing decision-making algorithms to cope with…
We introduce contextual queueing bandits, a new context-aware framework for scheduling while simultaneously learning unknown service rates. Individual jobs carry heterogeneous contextual features, based on which the agent chooses a job and…
We introduce data-driven decision-making algorithms that achieve state-of-the-art \emph{dynamic regret} bounds for non-stationary bandit settings. These settings capture applications such as advertisement allocation, dynamic pricing, and…
We consider model selection in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. Given a set of base learning algorithms, an effective model selection strategy adapts to the best learning algorithm in an online fashion. We show that by…
We consider an adversarial online learning setting where a decision maker can choose an action in every stage of the game. In addition to observing the reward of the chosen action, the decision maker gets side observations on the reward he…
We initiate the study of multi-stage episodic reinforcement learning under adversarial corruptions in both the rewards and the transition probabilities of the underlying system extending recent results for the special case of stochastic…