Related papers: Non-Stationary Latent Bandits
An individual's decisions are often guided by those of his or her peers, i.e., neighbors in a social network. Presumably, being privy to the experiences of others aids in learning and decision making, but how much advantage does an…
Most work on sequential learning assumes a fixed set of actions that are available all the time. However, in practice, actions can consist of picking subsets of readings from sensors that may break from time to time, road segments that can…
This paper addresses the critical challenge of stochastic latent heterogeneity in online decision-making, where individuals' responses to actions vary not only with observable contexts but also with unobserved, randomly realized subgroups.…
In the random-order model for online learning, the sequence of losses is chosen upfront by an adversary and presented to the learner after a random permutation. Any random-order input is \emph{asymptotically} equivalent to a stochastic…
Motivated by the pressing need for efficient optimization in online recommender systems, we revisit the cascading bandit model proposed by Kveton et al. (2015). While Thompson sampling (TS) algorithms have been shown to be empirically…
In the latent bandit problem, the learner has access to reward distributions and -- for the non-stationary variant -- transition models of the environment. The reward distributions are conditioned on the arm and unknown latent states. The…
We investigate properties of Thompson Sampling in the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with delayed feedback. In a setting with i.i.d delays, we establish to our knowledge the first regret bounds for Thompson Sampling with arbitrary…
One of the main strengths of online algorithms is their ability to adapt to arbitrary data sequences. This is especially important in nonparametric settings, where performance is measured against rich classes of comparator functions that…
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…
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…
Learning from prior tasks and transferring that experience to improve future performance is critical for building lifelong learning agents. Although results in supervised and reinforcement learning show that transfer may significantly…
We consider the stochastic linear contextual bandit problem with high-dimensional features. We analyze the Thompson sampling algorithm using special classes of sparsity-inducing priors (e.g., spike-and-slab) to model the unknown parameter…
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…
A common challenge for decision makers is selecting actions whose rewards are unknown and evolve over time based on prior policies. For instance, repeated use may reduce an action's effectiveness (habituation), while inactivity may restore…
We study supervisory switching control for partially-observed linear dynamical systems. The objective is to identify and deploy the best controller for the unknown system by periodically selecting among a collection of $N$ candidate…
We study online resource allocation under non-stationary demand with a minimum offline data requirement. In this problem, a decision-maker must allocate multiple types of resources to sequentially arriving queries over a finite horizon.…
Multiple-play bandits aim at displaying relevant items at relevant positions on a web page. We introduce a new bandit-based algorithm, PB-MHB, for online recommender systems which uses the Thompson sampling framework. This algorithm handles…
The contextual duelling bandit problem models adaptive recommender systems, where the algorithm presents a set of items to the user, and the user's choice reveals their preference. This setup is well suited for implicit choices users make…
We study a sequential decision problem where the learner faces a sequence of $K$-armed bandit tasks. The task boundaries might be known (the bandit meta-learning setting), or unknown (the non-stationary bandit setting). For a given integer…
Real-world applications of reinforcement learning for recommendation and experimentation faces a practical challenge: the relative reward of different bandit arms can evolve over the lifetime of the learning agent. To deal with these…