Related papers: Confidence-Budget Matching for Sequential Budgeted…
We consider a novel stochastic multi-armed bandit setting, where playing an arm makes it unavailable for a fixed number of time slots thereafter. This models situations where reusing an arm too often is undesirable (e.g. making the same…
This paper investigates the challenges of optimal online policy learning under missing data. State-of-the-art algorithms implicitly assume that rewards are always observable. I show that when rewards are missing at random, the Upper…
We present an online tutoring system that learns to provide effective feedback to students after they answer questions incorrectly. Using data from one million students, the system learns which assistance action (e.g., one of multiple…
We consider the problem of learning to play a repeated multi-agent game with an unknown reward function. Single player online learning algorithms attain strong regret bounds when provided with full information feedback, which unfortunately…
Preference-based feedback is important for many applications where direct evaluation of a reward function is not feasible. A notable recent example arises in reinforcement learning from human feedback on large language models. For many of…
We consider a multi-armed bandit framework where the rewards obtained by pulling different arms are correlated. We develop a unified approach to leverage these reward correlations and present fundamental generalizations of classic bandit…
We introduce Conformal Bandits, a novel framework integrating Conformal Prediction (CP) into bandit problems, a classic paradigm for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. Traditional regret-minimisation bandit strategies like…
We study a sequential resource allocation problem between a fixed number of arms. On each iteration the algorithm distributes a resource among the arms in order to maximize the expected success rate. Allocating more of the resource to a…
We introduce a Multi-User Contextual Cascading Bandit model, a new combinatorial bandit framework that captures realistic online advertising scenarios where multiple users interact with sequentially displayed items simultaneously. Unlike…
The problem of multi-armed bandits (MAB) asks to make sequential decisions while balancing between exploitation and exploration, and have been successfully applied to a wide range of practical scenarios. Various algorithms have been…
We consider the linear contextual multi-class multi-period packing problem (LMMP) where the goal is to pack items such that the total vector of consumption is below a given budget vector and the total value is as large as possible. We…
A search engine usually outputs a list of $K$ web pages. The user examines this list, from the first web page to the last, and chooses the first attractive page. This model of user behavior is known as the cascade model. In this paper, we…
In most practical settings and theoretical analyses, one assumes that a model can be trained until convergence. However, the growing complexity of machine learning datasets and models may violate such assumptions. Indeed, current approaches…
We propose a novel combinatorial stochastic-greedy bandit (SGB) algorithm for combinatorial multi-armed bandit problems when no extra information other than the joint reward of the selected set of $n$ arms at each time step $t\in [T]$ 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…
Multi-armed bandits (MAB) are commonly used in sequential online decision-making when the reward of each decision is an unknown random variable. In practice however, the typical goal of maximizing total reward may be less important than…
We study the sequential batch learning problem in linear contextual bandits with finite action sets, where the decision maker is constrained to split incoming individuals into (at most) a fixed number of batches and can only observe…
This paper investigates the robustness of causal bandits (CBs) in the face of temporal model fluctuations. This setting deviates from the existing literature's widely-adopted assumption of constant causal models. The focus is on causal…
Matching platforms, from ridesharing to food delivery to competitive gaming, face a fundamental operational dilemma: match agents immediately to minimize waiting costs, or delay to exploit the efficiency gains of thicker markets. Yet…
Classification systems are often deployed in resource-constrained settings where labels must be assigned to inputs on a budget of time, memory, etc. Budgeted, sequential classifiers (BSCs) address these scenarios by processing inputs…