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Related papers: Adapting to Misspecification in Contextual Bandits

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We consider the adversarial linear contextual bandit problem, where the loss vectors are selected fully adversarially and the per-round action set (i.e. the context) is drawn from a fixed distribution. Existing methods for this problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Haolin Liu , Chen-Yu Wei , Julian Zimmert

In this paper, we address the stochastic contextual linear bandit problem, where a decision maker is provided a context (a random set of actions drawn from a distribution). The expected reward of each action is specified by the inner…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-30 Osama A. Hanna , Lin F. Yang , Christina Fragouli

We study contextual linear bandit problems under feature uncertainty, where the features are noisy and have missing entries. To address the challenges posed by this noise, we analyze Bayesian oracles given the observed noisy features. Our…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Jung-hun Kim , Se-Young Yun , Minchan Jeong , Jun Hyun Nam , Jinwoo Shin , Richard Combes

We present an efficient algorithm for linear contextual bandits with adversarial losses and stochastic action sets. Our approach reduces this setting to misspecification-robust adversarial linear bandits with fixed action sets. Without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Tim van Erven , Jack Mayo , Julia Olkhovskaya , Chen-Yu Wei

We study budget-constrained contextual bandits with adversarial contexts, where each action yields a random reward and incurs a random cost. We adopt the standard realizability assumption: conditioned on the observed context, rewards and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Dhruv Sarkar , Abhishek Sinha

A recurring theme in statistical learning, online learning, and beyond is that faster convergence rates are possible for problems with low noise, often quantified by the performance of the best hypothesis; such results are known as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-07 Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy

We study contextual bandits in the presence of a stage-wise constraint when the constraint must be satisfied both with high probability and in expectation. We start with the linear case where both the reward function and the stage-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Aldo Pacchiano , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Peter Bartlett

We study nonparametric contextual bandits under batch constraints, where the expected reward for each action is modeled as a smooth function of covariates, and the policy updates are made at the end of each batch of observations. We…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-06 Rong Jiang , Cong Ma

Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving real-world decision making problems. In practice, collecting a contextual bandit's feedback from different domains may involve different costs. For example, measuring drug reaction from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Ziyan Wang , Xiaoming Huo , Hao Wang

Contextual sequential decision-making problems play a crucial role in machine learning, encompassing a wide range of downstream applications such as bandits, sequential hypothesis testing and online risk control. These applications often…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-31 Haichen Hu , Rui Ai , Stephen Bates , David Simchi-Levi

Contextual bandit algorithms are at the core of many applications, including recommender systems, clinical trials, and optimal portfolio selection. One of the most popular problems studied in the contextual bandit literature is to maximize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Siddhant Chaudhary , Abhishek Sinha

Despite the significant interest and progress in reinforcement learning (RL) problems with adversarial corruption, current works are either confined to the linear setting or lead to an undesired $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T}\zeta)$ regret bound,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-13 Chenlu Ye , Wei Xiong , Quanquan Gu , Tong Zhang

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

Existing guarantees for misspecified kernelized bandit optimization pay for misspecification through kernel complexity: in generic offline bounds, the misspecification level $\varepsilon$ is multiplied by $\sqrt{d_\mathrm{eff}}$, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Davide Maran , Csaba Szepesvári

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-26 Yufei Ruan , Jiaqi Yang , Yuan Zhou

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

Thanks to the power of representation learning, neural contextual bandit algorithms demonstrate remarkable performance improvement against their classical counterparts. But because their exploration has to be performed in the entire neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Yiling Jia , Weitong Zhang , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu , Hongning Wang

Model selection in supervised learning provides costless guarantees as if the model that best balances bias and variance was known a priori. We study the feasibility of similar guarantees for cumulative regret minimization in the stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Adrienne Margaret Propp , Susan Athey

We consider the problem of optimizing a black-box function based on noisy bandit feedback. Kernelized bandit algorithms have shown strong empirical and theoretical performance for this problem. They heavily rely on the assumption that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Ilija Bogunovic , Andreas Krause

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-23 Joseph Suk , Samory Kpotufe