Related papers: Robust Bandit Learning with Imperfect Context
We study a finite-horizon restless multi-armed bandit problem with multiple actions, dubbed R(MA)^2B. The state of each arm evolves according to a controlled Markov decision process (MDP), and the reward of pulling an arm depends on both…
Many sequential decision-making tasks require choosing at each decision step the right action out of the vast set of possibilities by extracting actionable intelligence from high-dimensional data streams. Most of the times, the…
We study the problem of federated stochastic multi-arm contextual bandits with unknown contexts, in which M agents are faced with different bandits and collaborate to learn. The communication model consists of a central server and the…
We tackle the problem of online reward maximisation over a large finite set of actions described by their contexts. We focus on the case when the number of actions is too big to sample all of them even once. However we assume that we have…
We consider a contextual bandit problem with $S$ contexts and $K$ actions. In each round $t=1,2,\dots$, the learner observes a random context and chooses an action based on its past experience. The learner then observes a random reward…
We study the stream-based online active learning in a contextual multi-armed bandit framework. In this framework, the reward depends on both the arm and the context. In a stream-based active learning setting, obtaining the ground truth of…
We study the linear contextual bandit problem in the presence of adversarial corruption, where the reward at each round is corrupted by an adversary, and the corruption level (i.e., the sum of corruption magnitudes over the horizon) is…
We consider contextual linear bandits over networks, a class of sequential decision-making problems where learning occurs simultaneously across multiple locations and the reward distributions share structural similarities while also…
We study contextual bandits with ancillary constraints on resources, which are common in real-world applications such as choosing ads or dynamic pricing of items. We design the first algorithm for solving these problems that handles…
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 bandit algorithms suffer from high regret during cold-start, when the learner has insufficient data to distinguish good arms from bad. We propose augmenting Disjoint LinUCB with LLM pseudo-observations: after each round, a large…
We study contextual bandits with budget and time constraints, referred to as constrained contextual bandits.The time and budget constraints significantly complicate the exploration and exploitation tradeoff because they introduce complex…
Safety is a desirable property that can immensely increase the applicability of learning algorithms in real-world decision-making problems. It is much easier for a company to deploy an algorithm that is safe, i.e., guaranteed to perform at…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a foundational framework in sequential decision-making under uncertainty, extensively studied for its applications in areas such as clinical trials, online advertising, and resource allocation.…
We design and implement an adaptive experiment (a ``contextual bandit'') to learn a targeted treatment assignment policy, where the goal is to use a participant's survey responses to determine which charity to expose them to in a donation…
We propose $\tt RandUCB$, a bandit strategy that builds on theoretically derived confidence intervals similar to upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms, but akin to Thompson sampling (TS), it uses randomization to trade off exploration and…
A major research direction in contextual bandits is to develop algorithms that are computationally efficient, yet support flexible, general-purpose function approximation. Algorithms based on modeling rewards have shown strong empirical…
Fast changing states or volatile environments pose a significant challenge to online optimization, which needs to perform rapid adaptation under limited observation. In this paper, we give query and regret optimal bandit algorithms under…
Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithms are a widely-used class of sequential algorithms for the $K$-armed bandit problem. Despite extensive research over the past decades aimed at understanding their asymptotic and (near) minimax…
We introduce the problem of model selection for contextual bandits, where a learner must adapt to the complexity of the optimal policy while balancing exploration and exploitation. Our main result is a new model selection guarantee for…