Related papers: Instance-Sensitive Algorithms for Pure Exploration…
Bandit algorithms solve diverse sequential decision-making problems, but are often too sample-inefficient for from-scratch personalization. To substantially reduce exploration times, latent bandit algorithms exploit cross-instance structure…
Contextual bandit learning is an increasingly popular approach to optimizing recommender systems via user feedback, but can be slow to converge in practice due to the need for exploring a large feature space. In this paper, we propose a…
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…
Bandit algorithms are guaranteed to solve diverse sequential decision-making problems, provided that a sufficient exploration budget is available. However, learning from scratch is often too costly for personalization tasks where a single…
We introduce a novel algorithmic approach to content recommendation based on adaptive clustering of exploration-exploitation ("bandit") strategies. We provide a sharp regret analysis of this algorithm in a standard stochastic noise setting,…
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 introduce a bandit framework for stochastic matching under the multinomial logit (MNL) choice model. In our setting, $N$ agents on one side are assigned to $K$ arms on the other side, where each arm stochastically selects an agent from…
Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) algorithms are widely used in recommender systems that require continuous, incremental learning. A core aspect of MABs is the exploration-exploitation trade-off: choosing between exploiting items likely to be…
We consider the contextual bandit problem, where a player sequentially makes decisions based on past observations to maximize the cumulative reward. Although many algorithms have been proposed for contextual bandit, most of them rely on…
Effective exploration is believed to positively influence the long-term user experience on recommendation platforms. Determining its exact benefits, however, has been challenging. Regular A/B tests on exploration often measure neutral or…
We propose the first fully-adaptive algorithm for pure exploration in linear bandits---the task to find the arm with the largest expected reward, which depends on an unknown parameter linearly. While existing methods partially or entirely…
Despite the great interest in the bandit problem, designing efficient algorithms for complex models remains challenging, as there is typically no analytical way to quantify uncertainty. In this paper, we propose Multiplier Bootstrap-based…
We provide a sound and consistent foundation for the use of \emph{nonrandom} exploration data in "contextual bandit" or "partially labeled" settings where only the value of a chosen action is learned. The primary challenge in a variety of…
We propose a contextual bandit based model to capture the learning and social welfare goals of a web platform in the presence of myopic users. By using payments to incentivize these agents to explore different items/recommendations, we show…
In this paper, we study the non-asymptotic sample complexity for the pure exploration problem in contextual bandits and tabular reinforcement learning (RL): identifying an epsilon-optimal policy from a set of policies with high probability.…
We study the problem of pure exploration in matching markets under uncertain preferences, where the goal is to identify a stable matching with confidence parameter $\delta$ and minimal sample complexity. Agents learn preferences via…
In real-world streaming recommender systems, user preferences evolve dynamically over time. Existing bandit-based methods treat time merely as a timestamp, neglecting its explicit relationship with user preferences and leading to suboptimal…
Contextual bandits have emerged as a cornerstone in reinforcement learning, enabling systems to make decisions with partial feedback. However, as contexts grow in complexity, traditional bandit algorithms can face challenges in adequately…
We present a new algorithm based on an gradient ascent for a general Active Exploration bandit problem in the fixed confidence setting. This problem encompasses several well studied problems such that the Best Arm Identification or…
Contextual bandits are widely-used in the study of learning-based control policies for finite action spaces. While the problem is well-studied for bandits with perfectly observed context vectors, little is known about the case of…