Related papers: Off-policy Confidence Sequences
In the stochastic linear contextual bandit setting there exist several minimax procedures for exploration with policies that are reactive to the data being acquired. In practice, there can be a significant engineering overhead to deploy…
We study the linear stochastic bandit problem, relaxing the standard i.i.d. assumption on the observation noise. As an alternative to this restrictive assumption, we allow the noise terms across rounds to be sub-Gaussian but interdependent,…
We introduce a framework for Thompson sampling (TS) contextual bandit algorithms, in which the algorithm's ability to quantify uncertainty and make decisions depends on the quality of a generative model that is learned offline. Instead of…
While contextual bandit has a mature theory, effectively leveraging different feedback patterns to enhance the pace of learning remains unclear. Bandits with feedback graphs, which interpolates between the full information and bandit…
The feedback that AI systems (e.g., recommender systems, chatbots) collect from user interactions is a crucial source of training data. While short-term feedback (e.g., clicks, engagement) is widely used for training, there is ample…
We study off-policy evaluation and learning from sequential data in a structured class of Markov decision processes that arise from repeated interactions with an exogenous sequence of arrivals with contexts, which generate unknown…
A fundamental challenge in contextual bandits is to develop flexible, general-purpose algorithms with computational requirements no worse than classical supervised learning tasks such as classification and regression. Algorithms based on…
Contextual bandits are widely used in industrial personalization systems. These online learning frameworks learn a treatment assignment policy in the presence of treatment effects that vary with the observed contextual features of the…
We propose a robust regression approach to off-policy evaluation (OPE) for contextual bandits. We frame OPE as a covariate-shift problem and leverage modern robust regression tools. Ours is a general approach that can be used to augment any…
The off-policy learning paradigm allows for recommender systems and general ranking applications to be framed as decision-making problems, where we aim to learn decision policies that optimize an unbiased offline estimate of an online…
Contextual multi-armed bandits are classical models in reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making associated with individual information. A widely-used policy for bandits is Thompson Sampling, where samples from a data-driven…
We consider the contextual bandit problem on general action and context spaces, where the learner's rewards depend on their selected actions and an observable context. This generalizes the standard multi-armed bandit to the case where side…
Computationally efficient contextual bandits are often based on estimating a predictive model of rewards given contexts and arms using past data. However, when the reward model is not well-specified, the bandit algorithm may incur…
PAC-Bayes has recently re-emerged as an effective theory with which one can derive principled learning algorithms with tight performance guarantees. However, applications of PAC-Bayes to bandit problems are relatively rare, which is a great…
Off-policy learning plays a pivotal role in optimizing and evaluating policies prior to the online deployment. However, during the real-time serving, we observe varieties of interventions and constraints that cause inconsistency between the…
Many sequential decision-making systems leverage data collected using prior policies to propose a new policy. For critical applications, it is important that high-confidence guarantees on the new policy's behavior are provided before…
In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, instance-dependent algorithms attain improved performance on "easy" problems with a gap between the best and second-best arm. Are similar guarantees possible for contextual bandits? While…
We consider the problem of contextual bandits where actions are subsets of a ground set and mean rewards are modeled by an unknown monotone submodular function that belongs to a class $\mathcal{F}$. We allow time-varying matroid constraints…
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…
Conservative Contextual Bandits (CCBs) address safety in sequential decision making by requiring that an agent's policy, along with minimizing regret, also satisfies a safety constraint: the performance is not worse than a baseline policy…