Related papers: Causal Bandits with Unknown Graph Structure

Healthcare artificial intelligence systems often degrade in performance when deployed across institutions, with documented performance drops and perpetuation of discriminatory patterns embedded in data. This brittleness comes, in part, from…

Causal structure learning from observational data remains a non-trivial task due to various factors such as finite sampling, unobserved confounding factors, and measurement errors. Constraint-based and score-based methods tend to suffer…

Causal structure learning has been a challenging task in the past decades and several mainstream approaches such as constraint- and score-based methods have been studied with theoretical guarantees. Recently, a new approach has transformed…

Our evolution as a species made a huge step forward when we understood the relationships between causes and effects. These associations may be trivial for some events, but they are not in complex scenarios. To rigorously prove that some…

For causal discovery in the presence of latent confounders, constraints beyond conditional independences exist that can enable causal discovery algorithms to distinguish more pairs of graphs. Such constraints are not well-understood yet. In…

Bandits with covariates, a.k.a. contextual bandits, address situations where optimal actions (or arms) at a given time $t$, depend on a context $x_t$, e.g., a new patient's medical history, a consumer's past purchases. While it is…

Contextual bandit algorithms -- a class of multi-armed bandit algorithms that exploit the contextual information -- have been shown to be effective in solving sequential decision making problems under uncertainty. A common assumption…

We investigate an efficient context-dependent clustering technique for recommender systems based on exploration-exploitation strategies through multi-armed bandits over multiple users. Our algorithm dynamically groups users based on their…

Excessively changing policies in many real world scenarios is difficult, unethical, or expensive. After all, doctor guidelines, tax codes, and price lists can only be reprinted so often. We may thus want to only change a policy when it is…

Contextual multi-armed bandits (CMAB) have been widely used for learning to filter and prioritize information according to a user's interest. In this work, we analyze top-K ranking under the CMAB framework where the top-K arms are chosen…

Structural causal models are the basic modelling unit in Pearl's causal theory; in principle they allow us to solve counterfactuals, which are at the top rung of the ladder of causation. But they often contain latent variables that limit…

The problem of multi-armed bandits (MAB) asks to make sequential decisions while balancing between exploitation and exploration, and have been successfully applied to a wide range of practical scenarios. Various algorithms have been…

We study finite-armed stochastic bandits where the rewards of each arm might be correlated to those of other arms. We introduce a novel phased algorithm that exploits the given structure to build confidence sets over the parameters of the…

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…

Understanding the laws that govern a phenomenon is the core of scientific progress. This is especially true when the goal is to model the interplay between different aspects in a causal fashion. Indeed, causal inference itself is…

This paper studies the adversarial graphical contextual bandits, a variant of adversarial multi-armed bandits that leverage two categories of the most common side information: \emph{contexts} and \emph{side observations}. In this setting, a…

Directed acyclic graphs have been used fruitfully to represent causal strucures (Pearl 1988). However, in the social sciences and elsewhere models are often used which correspond both causally and statistically to directed graphs with…

In a multi-armed bandit problem, an online algorithm chooses from a set of strategies in a sequence of trials so as to maximize the total payoff of the chosen strategies. While the performance of bandit algorithms with a small finite…

Causal inference methods based on conditional independence construct Markov equivalent graphs, and cannot be applied to bivariate cases. The approaches based on independence of cause and mechanism state, on the contrary, that causal…

Discovering and exploiting the causal structure in the environment is a crucial challenge for intelligent agents. Here we explore whether causal reasoning can emerge via meta-reinforcement learning. We train a recurrent network with…