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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

Multi-armed bandit problems provide a framework to identify the optimal intervention over a sequence of repeated experiments. Without additional assumptions, minimax optimal performance (measured by cumulative regret) is well-understood.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-28 Blair Bilodeau , Linbo Wang , Daniel M. Roy

The deployment of Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) has become commonplace in many economic applications. However, regret guarantees for even state-of-the-art linear bandit algorithms (such as Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty Linear bandit…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-02-28 Jingwen Zhang , Yifang Chen , Amandeep Singh

Contextual multi-armed bandits are a popular choice to model sequential decision-making. E.g., in a healthcare application we may perform various tests to asses a patient condition (exploration) and then decide on the best treatment to give…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Mirco Mutti , Jeongyeol Kwon , Shie Mannor , Aviv Tamar

This paper investigates regret minimization, statistical inference, and their interplay in high-dimensional online decision-making based on the sparse linear context bandit model. We integrate the $\varepsilon$-greedy bandit algorithm for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Congyuan Duan , Wanteng Ma , Jiashuo Jiang , Dong Xia

Combinatorial multi-armed bandits provide a fundamental online decision-making environment where a decision-maker interacts with an environment across $T$ time steps, each time selecting an action and learning the cost of that action. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Gerdus Benadè , Rathish Das , Thomas Lavastida

In the classical contextual bandits problem, in each round $t$, a learner observes some context $c$, chooses some action $i$ to perform, and receives some reward $r_{i,t}(c)$. We consider the variant of this problem where in addition to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-17 Santiago Balseiro , Negin Golrezaei , Mohammad Mahdian , Vahab Mirrokni , Jon Schneider

This paper investigates off-policy evaluation in contextual bandits, aiming to quantify the performance of a target policy using data collected under a different and potentially unknown behavior policy. Recently, methods based on conformal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-23 Yilong Wan , Yuqiang Li , Xianyi Wu

Tractable contextual bandit algorithms often rely on the realizability assumption - i.e., that the true expected reward model belongs to a known class, such as linear functions. In this work, we present a tractable bandit algorithm that is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Vitor Hadad , Susan Athey

We introduce the model selection problem in pure exploration linear bandits, where the learner needs to adapt to the instance-dependent complexity measure of the smallest hypothesis class containing the true model. We design algorithms in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-18 Yinglun Zhu , Julian Katz-Samuels , Robert Nowak

We consider the problem of adversarial bandit convex optimization, that is, online learning over a sequence of arbitrary convex loss functions with only one function evaluation for each of them. While all previous works assume known and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Haipeng Luo , Mengxiao Zhang , Peng Zhao

We study contextual bandits with low-rank structure where, in each round, if the (context, arm) pair $(i,j)\in [m]\times [n]$ is selected, the learner observes a noisy sample of the $(i,j)$-th entry of an unknown low-rank reward matrix.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Yassir Jedra , William Réveillard , Stefan Stojanovic , Alexandre Proutiere

We introduce a new stochastic smoothing perspective to study adversarial contextual bandit problems. We propose a general algorithm template that represents random perturbation based algorithms and identify several perturbation…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-12 Young Hun Jung , Ambuj Tewari

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

We study the multinomial logit (MNL) contextual bandit problem for sequential assortment selection. Although most existing research assumes utility functions to be linear in item features, this linearity assumption restricts the modeling of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Taehyun Hwang , Dahngoon Kim , Min-hwan Oh

Bandit optimization is a difficult problem, especially if the reward model is high-dimensional. When rewards are modeled by neural networks, sublinear regret has only been shown under strong assumptions, usually when the network is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Mikhail Terekhov

We introduce a novel online learning framework that unifies and generalizes pre-established models, such as delayed and corrupted feedback, to encompass adversarial environments where action feedback evolves over time. In this setting, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Yogev Bar-On , Yishay Mansour

We present efficient algorithms for the problem of contextual bandits with i.i.d. covariates, an arbitrary sequence of rewards, and an arbitrary class of policies. Our algorithm BISTRO requires d calls to the empirical risk minimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-02-09 Alexander Rakhlin , Karthik Sridharan

We study bandit learning in matching markets, where players and arms constitute the two market sides, and the players' utilities are linear in the arm contexts. In each round, new arms arrive with observable contexts. Then, the algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Shiyun Lin , Simon Mauras , Vianney Perchet , Nadav Merlis

We consider the problem of model selection for the general stochastic contextual bandits under the realizability assumption. We propose a successive refinement based algorithm called Adaptive Contextual Bandit ({\ttfamily ACB}), that works…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-21 Avishek Ghosh , Abishek Sankararaman , Kannan Ramchandran