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Related papers: Invariant Policy Learning: A Causal Perspective

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The ability to adapt to changes in environmental contingencies is an important challenge in reinforcement learning. Indeed, transferring previously acquired knowledge to environments with unseen structural properties can greatly enhance the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Ayman Boustati , Hana Chockler , Daniel C. McNamee

We propose an extensible deep learning method that uses reinforcement learning to train neural networks for offline ranking in information retrieval (IR). We call our method BanditRank as it treats ranking as a contextual bandit problem. In…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-10-24 Phanideep Gampa , Sumio Fujita

Recent advances in learning techniques have garnered attention for their applicability to a diverse range of real-world sequential decision-making problems. Yet, many practical applications have critical constraints for operation in real…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Jose A. Ayala-Romero , Andres Garcia-Saavedra , Xavier Costa-Perez

Causal graphical models can encode large amounts structural knowledge, both from the background knowledge of domain experts and the structural knowledge discovered from randomized experiments or observational data. However, though we may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Katherine Avery , Chinmay Pendse , David Jensen

Contextual bandit algorithms are increasingly replacing non-adaptive A/B tests in e-commerce, healthcare, and policymaking because they can both improve outcomes for study participants and increase the chance of identifying good or even…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-02 Aurélien Bibaut , Antoine Chambaz , Maria Dimakopoulou , Nathan Kallus , Mark van der Laan

We study a variant of causal contextual bandits where the context is chosen based on an initial intervention chosen by the learner. At the beginning of each round, the learner selects an initial action, depending on which a stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Rahul Madhavan , Aurghya Maiti , Gaurav Sinha , Siddharth Barman

Contextual bandit algorithms have transformed modern experimentation by enabling real-time adaptation for personalized treatment and efficient use of data. Yet these advantages create challenges for statistical inference due to adaptivity.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-09-23 Yongyi Guo , Ziping Xu

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

Causal bandit is a nascent learning model where an agent sequentially experiments in a causal network of variables, in order to identify the reward-maximizing intervention. Despite the model's wide applicability, existing analytical results…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-09 Ruiyang Song , Stefano Rini , Kuang Xu

To address the contextual bandit problem, we propose an online random forest algorithm. The analysis of the proposed algorithm is based on the sample complexity needed to find the optimal decision stump. Then, the decision stumps are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-09-16 Raphaël Féraud , Robin Allesiardo , Tanguy Urvoy , Fabrice Clérot

Bandits with feedback graphs are powerful online learning models that interpolate between the full information and classic bandit problems, capturing many real-life applications. A recent work by Zhang et al. (2023) studies the contextual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-14 Mengxiao Zhang , Yuheng Zhang , Haipeng Luo , Paul Mineiro

Offline contextual bandits allow one to learn policies from historical/offline data without requiring online interaction. However, offline policy optimization that maximizes overall expected rewards can unintentionally amplify the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Yihong Guo , Junjie Luo , Guodong Gao , Ritu Agarwal , Anqi Liu

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

Advances in reinforcement learning research have demonstrated the ways in which different agent-based models can learn how to optimally perform a task within a given environment. Reinforcement leaning solves unsupervised problems where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-03 Herkulaas Combrink , Vukosi Marivate , Benjamin Rosman

We study contextual bandit learning with an abstract policy class and continuous action space. We obtain two qualitatively different regret bounds: one competes with a smoothed version of the policy class under no continuity assumptions,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-23 Akshay Krishnamurthy , John Langford , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Chicheng Zhang

Personalized web services strive to adapt their services (advertisements, news articles, etc) to individual users by making use of both content and user information. Despite a few recent advances, this problem remains challenging for at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-05 Lihong Li , Wei Chu , John Langford , Robert E. Schapire

In a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, an online algorithm makes a sequence of choices. In each round it chooses from a time-invariant set of alternatives and receives the payoff associated with this alternative. While the case of small…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2014-05-21 Aleksandrs Slivkins

We design and implement an adaptive experiment (a ``contextual bandit'') to learn a targeted treatment assignment policy, where the goal is to use a participant's survey responses to determine which charity to expose them to in a donation…

Machine learning methods can be unreliable when deployed in domains that differ from the domains on which they were trained. There are a wide range of proposals for mitigating this problem by learning representations that are ``invariant''…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-09 Zihao Wang , Victor Veitch

We study offline data poisoning attacks in contextual bandits, a class of reinforcement learning problems with important applications in online recommendation and adaptive medical treatment, among others. We provide a general attack…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-27 Yuzhe Ma , Kwang-Sung Jun , Lihong Li , Xiaojin Zhu