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We present the first high-probability optimal regret bound for a policy optimization technique applied to the problem of stochastic contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) with general offline function approximation. Our algorithm is both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Orin Levy , Yishay Mansour

There are two variants of the classical multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem that have received considerable attention from machine learning researchers in recent years: contextual bandits and simple regret minimization. Contextual bandits are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-27 Aniket Anand Deshmukh , Srinagesh Sharma , James W. Cutler , Mark Moldwin , Clayton Scott

Combinatorial online learning is a fundamental task for selecting the optimal action (or super arm) as a combination of base arms in sequential interactions with systems providing stochastic rewards. It is applicable to diverse domains such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Seockbean Song , Youngsik Yoon , Siwei Wang , Wei Chen , Jungseul Ok

In this paper, we address the contextual dueling bandit problem by proposing variance-aware algorithms that leverage neural networks to approximate nonlinear utility functions. Our approach employs a \textit{variance-aware exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Youngmin Oh , Jinje Park , Taejin Paik , Jaemin Park

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-11 Mónika Farsang , Paul Mineiro , Wangda Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Dean P. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Dhruv Sarkar , Abhishek Sinha

We consider the combinatorial volatile Gaussian process (GP) semi-bandit problem. Each round, an agent is provided a set of available base arms and must select a subset of them to maximize the long-term cumulative reward. We study the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Jack Sandberg , Niklas Åkerblom , Morteza Haghir Chehreghani

In this paper, we study the problem of fair sequential decision making with biased linear bandit feedback. At each round, a player selects an action described by a covariate and by a sensitive attribute. The perceived reward is a linear…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-06-06 Solenne Gaucher , Alexandra Carpentier , Christophe Giraud

We consider the problem of model selection for the general stochastic contextual bandits under the realizability assumption. We propose a successive refinement based algorithm called Adaptive Contextual Bandit ({\ttfamily ACB}), that works…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-21 Avishek Ghosh , Abishek Sankararaman , Kannan Ramchandran

We study the contextual multi-armed bandit problem with a finite context space (a.k.a. subpopulations), where the learner recommends a best action for each context and is evaluated by context-weighted simple regret. Our guarantees are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Mohammad Shahverdikondori , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash

For infinite action contextual bandits, smoothed regret and reduction to regression results in state-of-the-art online performance with computational cost independent of the action set: unfortunately, the resulting data exhaust does not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Mark Rucker , Yinglun Zhu , Paul Mineiro

Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-07 Branislav Kveton , Martin Mladenov , Chih-Wei Hsu , Manzil Zaheer , Csaba Szepesvari , Craig Boutilier

The linear contextual bandit literature is mostly focused on the design of efficient learning algorithms for a given representation. However, a contextual bandit problem may admit multiple linear representations, each one with different…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-09 Matteo Papini , Andrea Tirinzoni , Marcello Restelli , Alessandro Lazaric , Matteo Pirotta

Contextual bandit with linear reward functions is among one of the most extensively studied models in bandit and online learning research. Recently, there has been increasing interest in designing \emph{locally private} linear contextual…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-16 Jiachun Li , David Simchi-Levi , Yining Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-15 Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Haipeng Luo

We introduce a novel online learning framework that unifies and generalizes pre-established models, such as delayed and corrupted feedback, to encompass adversarial environments where action feedback evolves over time. In this setting, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Yogev Bar-On , Yishay Mansour

Multi-dimensional online decision making plays a crucial role in many real applications such as online recommendation and digital marketing. In these problems, a decision at each time is a combination of choices from different types of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-14 Jie Zhou , Botao Hao , Zheng Wen , Jingfei Zhang , Will Wei Sun

Most recommender systems recommend a list of items. The user examines the list, from the first item to the last, and often chooses the first attractive item and does not examine the rest. This type of user behavior can be modeled by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-07-01 Shi Zong , Hao Ni , Kenny Sung , Nan Rosemary Ke , Zheng Wen , Branislav Kveton

Algorithm selection is typically based on models of algorithm performance, learned during a separate offline training sequence, which can be prohibitively expensive. In recent work, we adopted an online approach, in which a performance…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-31 Matteo Gagliolo , Juergen Schmidhuber