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Related papers: Neural Contextual Bandits without Regret

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Cooperative multi-agent decision making involves a group of agents cooperatively solving learning problems while communicating over a network with delays. In this paper, we consider the kernelised contextual bandit problem, where the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-17 Abhimanyu Dubey , Alex Pentland

In many sequential decision-making problems, the individuals are split into several batches and the decision-maker is only allowed to change her policy at the end of batches. These batch problems have a large number of applications, ranging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Quanquan Gu , Amin Karbasi , Khashayar Khosravi , Vahab Mirrokni , Dongruo Zhou

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 study a general class of contextual bandits, where each context-action pair is associated with a raw feature vector, but the reward generating function is unknown. We propose a novel learning algorithm that transforms the raw feature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Pan Xu , Zheng Wen , Handong Zhao , Quanquan Gu

Conservative mechanism is a desirable property in decision-making problems which balance the tradeoff between the exploration and exploitation. We propose the novel \emph{conservative contextual combinatorial cascading bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-26 Kun Wang , Canzhe Zhao , Shuai Li , Shuo Shao

Most contextual bandit algorithms minimize regret against the best fixed policy, a questionable benchmark for non-stationary environments that are ubiquitous in applications. In this work, we develop several efficient contextual bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-05 Haipeng Luo , Chen-Yu Wei , Alekh Agarwal , John Langford

We study constrained contextual bandits (CCB) with adversarially chosen contexts, where each action yields a random reward and incurs a random cost. We adopt the standard realizability assumption: conditioned on the observed context,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Dhruv Sarkar , Abhishek Sinha

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

We study the linear contextual bandit problem with finite action sets. When the problem dimension is $d$, the time horizon is $T$, and there are $n \leq 2^{d/2}$ candidate actions per time period, we (1) show that the minimax expected…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-20 Yingkai Li , Yining Wang , Yuan Zhou

We study the $K$-armed contextual dueling bandit problem, a sequential decision making setting in which the learner uses contextual information to make two decisions, but only observes \emph{preference-based feedback} suggesting that one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-25 Aadirupa Saha , Akshay Krishnamurthy

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

In this paper, we propose and study opportunistic contextual bandits - a special case of contextual bandits where the exploration cost varies under different environmental conditions, such as network load or return variation in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Xueying Guo , Xiaoxiao Wang , Xin Liu

We study a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, where at each time step, the player observes an independently sampled context that determines the arms' mean rewards. However, playing an arm blocks it (across all contexts) for a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Soumya Basu , Orestis Papadigenopoulos , Constantine Caramanis , Sanjay Shakkottai

In this paper, we investigate the impact of context diversity on stochastic linear contextual bandits. As opposed to the previous view that contexts lead to more difficult bandit learning, we show that when the contexts are sufficiently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Weiqiang Wu , Jing Yang , Cong Shen

Safety is a desirable property that can immensely increase the applicability of learning algorithms in real-world decision-making problems. It is much easier for a company to deploy an algorithm that is safe, i.e., guaranteed to perform at…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-07 Abbas Kazerouni , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Benjamin Van Roy

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 consider the problem of designing contextual bandit algorithms in the ``cross-learning'' setting of Balseiro et al., where the learner observes the loss for the action they play in all possible contexts, not just the context of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-04 Jon Schneider , Julian Zimmert

Contextual multi-armed bandits provide powerful tools to solve the exploitation-exploration dilemma in decision making, with direct applications in the personalized recommendation. In fact, collaborative effects among users carry the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Yikun Ban , Yunzhe Qi , Tianxin Wei , Jingrui He

In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Ruohan Zhan , Susan Athey , Emma Brunskill

Contextual dueling bandit is used to model the bandit problems, where a learner's goal is to find the best arm for a given context using observed noisy human preference feedback over the selected arms for the past contexts. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Arun Verma , Zhongxiang Dai , Xiaoqiang Lin , Patrick Jaillet , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low