Related papers: Adapting to Misspecification in Contextual Bandits…
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…
We consider the general (stochastic) contextual bandit problem under the realizability assumption, i.e., the expected reward, as a function of contexts and actions, belongs to a general function class $\mathcal{F}$. We design a fast and…
Designing efficient general-purpose contextual bandit algorithms that work with large -- or even continuous -- action spaces would facilitate application to important scenarios such as information retrieval, recommendation systems, and…
We consider the contextual bandit problem where at each time, the agent only has access to a noisy version of the context and the error variance (or an estimator of this variance). This setting is motivated by a wide range of applications…
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 study linear contextual bandits in the misspecified setting, where the expected reward function can be approximated by a linear function class up to a bounded misspecification level $\zeta>0$. We propose an algorithm based on a novel…
In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective…
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…
We present a new algorithm for the contextual bandit learning problem, where the learner repeatedly takes one of $K$ actions in response to the observed context, and observes the reward only for that chosen action. Our method assumes access…
We give an oracle-based algorithm for the adversarial contextual bandit problem, where either contexts are drawn i.i.d. or the sequence of contexts is known a priori, but where the losses are picked adversarially. Our algorithm is…
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…
We propose an algorithmic framework, Offline Estimation to Decisions (OE2D), that reduces contextual bandit learning with general reward function approximation to offline regression. The framework allows near-optimal regret for contextual…
We study constrained contextual bandits (CCB) with adversarially chosen contexts, where each action yields a random reward and incurs a random cost. We adopt the standard realizability assumption: conditioned on the observed context,…
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…
This work studies linear bandits under a new notion of gap-adjusted misspecification and is an extension of Liu et al. (2023). When the underlying reward function is not linear, existing linear bandits work usually relies on a uniform…
Most contextual bandit algorithms minimize regret against the best fixed policy, a questionable benchmark for non-stationary environments that are ubiquitous in applications. In this work, we develop several efficient contextual bandit…
We study budget-constrained contextual bandits with adversarial contexts, where each action yields a random reward and incurs a random cost. We adopt the standard realizability assumption: conditioned on the observed context, rewards and…
Contextual bandits are widely used in Internet services from news recommendation to advertising, and to Web search. Generalized linear models (logistical regression in particular) have demonstrated stronger performance than linear models in…
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…
We consider the problem of online learning in misspecified linear stochastic multi-armed bandit problems. Regret guarantees for state-of-the-art linear bandit algorithms such as Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty Linear bandit (OFUL) hold…