Related papers: Relational Boosted Bandits
Contextual bandit algorithms are increasingly replacing non-adaptive A/B tests in e-commerce, healthcare, and policymaking because they can both improve outcomes for study participants and increase the chance of identifying good or even…
We consider a novel variant of the contextual bandit problem (i.e., the multi-armed bandit with side-information, or context, available to a decision-maker) where the context used at each decision may be corrupted ("useless context"). This…
Contextual bandit algorithms often estimate reward models to inform decision-making. However, true rewards can contain action-independent redundancies that are not relevant for decision-making. We show it is more data-efficient to estimate…
Contextual bandits are a common problem faced by machine learning practitioners in domains as diverse as hypothesis testing to product recommendations. There have been a lot of approaches in exploiting rich data representations for…
Key challenges in running a retail business include how to select products to present to consumers (the assortment problem), and how to price products (the pricing problem) to maximize revenue or profit. Instead of considering these…
We consider a novel formulation of the multi-armed bandit model, which we call the contextual bandit with restricted context, where only a limited number of features can be accessed by the learner at every iteration. This novel formulation…
Contextual bandit algorithms are ubiquitous tools for active sequential experimentation in healthcare and the tech industry. They involve online learning algorithms that adaptively learn policies over time to map observed contexts $X_t$ to…
Contextual bandit algorithms have transformed modern experimentation by enabling real-time adaptation for personalized treatment and efficient use of data. Yet these advantages create challenges for statistical inference due to adaptivity.…
This paper studies bandit problems where an agent has access to offline data that might be utilized to potentially improve the estimation of each arm's reward distribution. A major obstacle in this setting is the existence of compound…
Multi-armed bandit algorithms have become a reference solution for handling the explore/exploit dilemma in recommender systems, and many other important real-world problems, such as display advertisement. However, such algorithms usually…
Contextual bandits with average-case statistical guarantees are inadequate in risk-averse situations because they might trade off degraded worst-case behaviour for better average performance. Designing a risk-averse contextual bandit is…
Contextual bandits serve as a fundamental model for many sequential decision making tasks. The most popular theoretically justified approaches are based on the optimism principle. While these algorithms can be practical, they are known to…
We present an adaptive learning Intelligent Tutoring System, which uses model-based reinforcement learning in the form of contextual bandits to assign learning activities to students. The model is trained on the trajectories of thousands of…
This paper introduces a novel multi-armed bandits framework, termed Contextual Restless Bandits (CRB), for complex online decision-making. This CRB framework incorporates the core features of contextual bandits and restless bandits, so that…
This work explores the idea of a causal contextual multi-armed bandit approach to automated marketing, where we estimate and optimize the causal (incremental) effects. Focusing on causal effect leads to better return on investment (ROI) by…
Thanks to the power of representation learning, neural contextual bandit algorithms demonstrate remarkable performance improvement against their classical counterparts. But because their exploration has to be performed in the entire neural…
The rise of large-scale pretrained models has made it feasible to generate predictive or synthetic features at low cost, raising the question of how to incorporate such surrogate predictions into downstream decision-making. We study this…
Recent work shows that when contexts are drawn i.i.d., linear contextual bandits can be reduced to single-context linear bandits. This ``contexts are cheap" perspective is highly advantageous, as it allows for sharper finite-time analyses…
Many of the recent triumphs in machine learning are dependent on well-tuned hyperparameters. This is particularly prominent in reinforcement learning (RL) where a small change in the configuration can lead to failure. Despite the importance…
Personalization is a crucial aspect of many online experiences. In particular, content ranking is often a key component in delivering sophisticated personalization results. Commonly, supervised learning-to-rank methods are applied, which…