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Related papers: Contextual Bandits with Sparse Data in Web setting

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We consider an online decision making setting known as contextual bandit problem, and propose an approach for improving contextual bandit performance by using an adaptive feature extraction (representation learning) based on online…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Baihan Lin , Djallel Bouneffouf , Guillermo Cecchi , Irina Rish

In stochastic contextual bandits, an agent sequentially makes actions from a time-dependent action set based on past experience to minimize the cumulative regret. Like many other machine learning algorithms, the performance of bandits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Yue Kang , Cho-Jui Hsieh , Thomas C. M. Lee

We investigate the sparse linear contextual bandit problem where the parameter $\theta$ is sparse. To relieve the sampling inefficiency, we utilize the "perturbed adversary" where the context is generated adversarilly but with small random…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-20 Zhiyuan Liu , Huazheng Wang , Bo Waggoner , Youjian , Liu , Lijun Chen

In this paper, we analyze and extend an online learning framework known as Context-Attentive Bandit, motivated by various practical applications, from medical diagnosis to dialog systems, where due to observation costs only a small subset…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Djallel Bouneffouf , Raphaël Féraud , Sohini Upadhyay , Yasaman Khazaeni , Irina Rish

Contextual bandits are a form of multi-armed bandit in which the agent has access to predictive side information (known as the context) for each arm at each time step, and have been used to model personalized news recommendation, ad…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-05-25 Aniket Anand Deshmukh , Urun Dogan , Clayton Scott

We study linear contextual bandits with access to a large, confounded, offline dataset that was sampled from some fixed policy. We show that this problem is closely related to a variant of the bandit problem with side information. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-11 Guy Tennenholtz , Uri Shalit , Shie Mannor , Yonathan Efroni

Stochastic linear contextual bandit algorithms have substantial applications in practice, such as recommender systems, online advertising, clinical trials, etc. Recent works show that optimal bandit algorithms are vulnerable to adversarial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-31 Qin Ding , Cho-Jui Hsieh , James Sharpnack

A central problem in sequential decision making is to develop algorithms that are practical and computationally efficient, yet support the use of flexible, general-purpose models. Focusing on the contextual bandit problem, recent progress…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Yinglun Zhu , Dylan J. Foster , John Langford , Paul Mineiro

In recent years, preference-based human feedback mechanisms have become essential for enhancing model performance across diverse applications, including conversational AI systems such as ChatGPT. However, existing approaches often neglect…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Raihan Seraj , Lili Meng , Tristan Sylvain

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-18 Maria Dimakopoulou , Zhengyuan Zhou , Susan Athey , Guido Imbens

Efficient online decision-making in contextual bandits is challenging, as methods without informative priors often suffer from computational or statistical inefficiencies. In this work, we leverage pre-trained diffusion models as expressive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Imad Aouali

We create a computationally tractable algorithm for contextual bandits with continuous actions having unknown structure. Our reduction-style algorithm composes with most supervised learning representations. We prove that it works in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-07 Maryam Majzoubi , Chicheng Zhang , Rajan Chari , Akshay Krishnamurthy , John Langford , Aleksandrs Slivkins

We consider a novel formulation of the multi-armed bandit model, which we call the contextual bandit with restricted context, where only a limited number of features can be accessed by the learner at every iteration. This novel formulation…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-06-09 Djallel Bouneffouf , Irina Rish , Guillermo A. Cecchi , Raphael Feraud

We consider a novel variant of the contextual bandit problem (i.e., the multi-armed bandit with side-information, or context, available to a decision-maker) where the reward associated with each context-based decision may not always be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-21 Djallel Bouneffouf , Sohini Upadhyay , Yasaman Khazaeni

Contextual bandit is a general framework for online learning in sequential decision-making problems that has found application in a wide range of domains, including recommendation systems, online advertising, and clinical trials. A critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-24 Evrard Garcelon , Vianney Perchet , Matteo Pirotta

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Yinglun Zhu , Paul Mineiro

Contextual bandits are a common problem faced by machine learning practitioners in domains as diverse as hypothesis testing to product recommendations. There have been a lot of approaches in exploiting rich data representations for…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-03-20 Aniket Anand Deshmukh , Abhimanu Kumar , Levi Boyles , Denis Charles , Eren Manavoglu , Urun Dogan

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-08-03 Ashwinkumar Badanidiyuru , John Langford , Aleksandrs Slivkins

Real-world applications of contextual bandits often exhibit non-stationarity due to seasonality, serendipity, and evolving social trends. While a number of non-stationary contextual bandit learning algorithms have been proposed in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Zheqing Zhu , Yueyang Liu , Xu Kuang , Benjamin Van Roy

We propose a new sequential decision-making setting, combining key aspects of two established online learning problems with bandit feedback. The optimal action to play at any given moment is contingent on an underlying changing state which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Alexander Galozy , Slawomir Nowaczyk , Mattias Ohlsson