Related papers: Instance-Sensitive Algorithms for Pure Exploration…

Real-world applications of contextual bandits often exhibit non-stationarity due to seasonality, serendipity, and evolving social trends. While a number of non-stationary contextual bandit learning algorithms have been proposed in the…

Stochastic linear contextual bandit algorithms have substantial applications in practice, such as recommender systems, online advertising, clinical trials, etc. Recent works show that optimal bandit algorithms are vulnerable to adversarial…

We study Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits (CMABs) for non-episodic sequential decision making problems where the context includes both textual and numerical information (e.g., recommendation systems, dynamic portfolio adjustments, offer…

Online learning algorithms, widely used to power search and content optimization on the web, must balance exploration and exploitation, potentially sacrificing the experience of current users in order to gain information that will lead to…

Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…

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…

Bandit learning has been an increasingly popular design choice for recommender system. Despite the strong interest in bandit learning from the community, there remains multiple bottlenecks that prevent many bandit learning approaches from…

A recent body of work addresses safety constraints in explore-and-exploit systems. Such constraints arise where, for example, exploration is carried out by individuals whose welfare should be balanced with overall welfare. In this paper, we…

The multi-armed bandit problem is a core framework for sequential decision-making under uncertainty, but classical algorithms often fail in environments with hidden, time-varying states that confound reward estimation and optimal action…

In the incentivized exploration model, a principal aims to explore and learn over time by interacting with a sequence of self-interested agents. It has been recently understood that the main challenge in designing incentive-compatible…

Effective solving of constraint problems often requires choosing good or specific search heuristics. However, choosing or designing a good search heuristic is non-trivial and is often a manual process. In this paper, rather than manually…

Optimization is commonly employed to determine the content of web pages, such as to maximize conversions on landing pages or click-through rates on search engine result pages. Often the layout of these pages can be decoupled into several…

We study a specific \textit{combinatorial pure exploration stochastic bandit problem} where the learner aims at finding the set of arms whose means are above a given threshold, up to a given precision, and \textit{for a fixed time horizon}.…

In this paper we adapt the nearest neighbour rule to the contextual bandit problem. Our algorithm handles the fully adversarial setting in which no assumptions at all are made about the data-generation process. When combined with a…

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…

The piecewise-stationary bandit problem is an important variant of the multi-armed bandit problem that further considers abrupt changes in the reward distributions. The main theme of the problem is the trade-off between exploration for…

Reinforcement learning addresses the dilemma between exploration to find profitable actions and exploitation to act according to the best observations already made. Bandit problems are one such class of problems in stateless environments…

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly popular, there is a growing need to predict which out of a set of LLMs will yield a successful answer to a given query at low cost. This problem promises to become even more relevant as…

We study the dynamic joint assortment selection and positioning problem, where the attraction of each product depends on both its intrinsic appeal and its display position under a Multinomial Logit (MNL) choice framework. Our study ranges…

Motivated by generating personalized recommendations using ordinal (or preference) data, we study the question of learning a mixture of MultiNomial Logit (MNL) model, a parameterized class of distributions over permutations, from partial…