Related papers: Incentivizing Exploration in Linear Bandits under …

Bandit learning is characterized by the tension between long-term exploration and short-term exploitation. However, as has recently been noted, in settings in which the choices of the learning algorithm correspond to important decisions…

Increasingly, recommender systems are tasked with improving users' long-term satisfaction. In this context, we study a content exploration task, which we formalize as a bandit problem with delayed rewards. There is an apparent trade-off in…

The multi-armed bandit(MAB) is a classical sequential decision problem. Most work requires assumptions about the reward distribution (e.g., bounded), while practitioners may have difficulty obtaining information about these distributions to…

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…

Most modern systems strive to learn from interactions with users, and many engage in exploration: making potentially suboptimal choices for the sake of acquiring new information. We initiate a study of the interplay between exploration and…

We study the repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal indirectly interacts with the unknown environment by proposing incentives for the agent to play arms. Most existing work assumes the agent has full knowledge of the…

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…

In this paper, we propose an information-theoretic exploration strategy for stochastic, discrete multi-armed bandits that achieves optimal regret. Our strategy is based on the value of information criterion. This criterion measures the…

This paper addresses the exploration-exploitation dilemma inherent in decision-making, focusing on multi-armed bandit problems. The problems involve an agent deciding whether to exploit current knowledge for immediate gains or explore new…

We propose a new problem setting to study the sequential interactions between a recommender system and a user. Instead of assuming the user is omniscient, static, and explicit, as the classical practice does, we sketch a more realistic user…

Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…

We use a novel modification of Multi-Armed Bandits to create a new model for recommendation systems. We model the recommendation system as a bandit seeking to maximize reward by pulling on arms with unknown rewards. The catch however is…

We propose the first fully-adaptive algorithm for pure exploration in linear bandits---the task to find the arm with the largest expected reward, which depends on an unknown parameter linearly. While existing methods partially or entirely…

We consider a scenario where an agent has multiple available strategies to explore an unknown environment. For each new interaction with the environment, the agent must select which exploration strategy to use. We provide a new…

We study a novel variant of the parameterized bandits problem in which the learner can observe additional auxiliary feedback that is correlated with the observed reward. The auxiliary feedback is readily available in many real-life…

Recommender systems are a ubiquitous feature of online platforms. Increasingly, they are explicitly tasked with increasing users' long-term satisfaction. In this context, we study a content exploration task, which we formalize as a…

We study social learning dynamics motivated by reviews on online platforms. The agents collectively follow a simple multi-armed bandit protocol, but each agent acts myopically, without regards to exploration. We allow the greedy…

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…

A contextual bandit problem is studied in a highly non-stationary environment, which is ubiquitous in various recommender systems due to the time-varying interests of users. Two models with disjoint and hybrid payoffs are considered to…

Recommender systems trained in a continuous learning fashion are plagued by the feedback loop problem, also known as algorithmic bias. This causes a newly trained model to act greedily and favor items that have already been engaged by…