Related papers: Invariant Policy Learning: A Causal Perspective
In statistical learning, algorithms for model selection allow the learner to adapt to the complexity of the best hypothesis class in a sequence. We ask whether similar guarantees are possible for contextual bandit learning.
Reinforcement learning (RL) has produced spectacular results in games, robotics, and continuous control. Yet, despite these successes, learned policies often fail to generalize beyond their training distribution, limiting real-world impact.…
In this paper, we study a transfer reinforcement learning problem where the state transitions and rewards are affected by the environmental context. Specifically, we consider a demonstrator agent that has access to a context-aware policy…
The rise of large-scale pretrained models has made it feasible to generate predictive or synthetic features at low cost, raising the question of how to incorporate such surrogate predictions into downstream decision-making. We study this…
In real-world streaming recommender systems, user preferences often dynamically change over time (e.g., a user may have different preferences during weekdays and weekends). Existing bandit-based streaming recommendation models only consider…
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit diverse response behaviors, costs, and strengths, making it challenging to select the most suitable LLM for a given user query. We study the problem of adaptive multi-LLM selection in an online setting,…
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…
Contextual bandits are incredibly useful in many practical problems. We go one step further by devising a more realistic problem that combines: (1) contextual bandits with dense arm features, (2) non-linear reward functions, and (3) a…
While classical formulations of multi-armed bandit problems assume that each arm's reward is independent and stationary, real-world applications often involve non-stationary environments and interdependencies between arms. In particular,…
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…
Object-goal navigation (Object-nav) entails searching, recognizing and navigating to a target object. Object-nav has been extensively studied by the Embodied-AI community, but most solutions are often restricted to considering static…
Reinforcement learning algorithms have had tremendous successes in online learning settings. However, these successes have relied on low-stakes interactions between the algorithmic agent and its environment. In many settings where RL could…
In this work, we describe practical lessons we have learned from successfully using contextual bandits (CBs) to improve key business metrics of the Microsoft Virtual Agent for customer support. While our current use cases focus on single…
Contextual bandit algorithms are applied in a wide range of domains, from advertising to recommender systems, from clinical trials to education. In many of these domains, malicious agents may have incentives to attack the bandit algorithm…
When an AI system interacts with multiple users, it frequently needs to make allocation decisions. For instance, a virtual agent decides whom to pay attention to in a group setting, or a factory robot selects a worker to deliver a part.…
The primary goal of my Ph.D. study is to develop provably efficient and practical algorithms for data-driven sequential decision-making under uncertainty. My work focuses on reinforcement learning (RL), multi-armed bandits, and their…
Motivated by practical needs such as large-scale learning, we study the impact of adaptivity constraints to linear contextual bandits, a central problem in online active learning. We consider two popular limited adaptivity models in…
For a real-world decision-making problem, the reward function often needs to be engineered or learned. A popular approach is to utilize human feedback to learn a reward function for training. The most straightforward way to do so is to ask…
Motivated by scenarios of information diffusion and advertising in social media, we study an influence maximization problem in which little is assumed to be known about the diffusion network or about the model that determines how…
We propose an estimator and confidence interval for computing the value of a policy from off-policy data in the contextual bandit setting. To this end we apply empirical likelihood techniques to formulate our estimator and confidence…