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Related papers: Adapting to Misspecification in Contextual Bandits

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Online model selection in Bayesian bandits raises a fundamental exploration challenge: When an environment instance is sampled from a prior distribution, how can we design an adaptive strategy that explores multiple bandit learners and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Aida Afshar , Yuke Zhang , Aldo Pacchiano

We study the linear contextual bandit problem in the presence of adversarial corruption, where the reward at each round is corrupted by an adversary, and the corruption level (i.e., the sum of corruption magnitudes over the horizon) is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Tong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

We study a constrained contextual linear bandit setting, where the goal of the agent is to produce a sequence of policies, whose expected cumulative reward over the course of $T$ rounds is maximum, and each has an expected cost below a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-20 Aldo Pacchiano , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Peter Bartlett , Heinrich Jiang

We consider the adversarial linear contextual bandit setting, which allows for the loss functions associated with each of $K$ arms to change over time without restriction. Assuming the $d$-dimensional contexts are drawn from a fixed known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-25 Julia Olkhovskaya , Jack Mayo , Tim van Erven , Gergely Neu , Chen-Yu Wei

We study the stochastic contextual bandit problem, where the reward is generated from an unknown function with additive noise. No assumption is made about the reward function other than boundedness. We propose a new algorithm, NeuralUCB,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-03 Dongruo Zhou , Lihong Li , Quanquan Gu

The cross-learning contextual bandit problem with graphical feedback has recently attracted significant attention. In this setting, there is a contextual bandit with a feedback graph over the arms, and pulling an arm reveals the loss for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Ruiyuan Huang , Zengfeng Huang

Typical contextual bandit algorithms assume that the rewards at each round lie in some fixed range $[0, R]$, and their regret scales polynomially with this reward range $R$. However, many practical scenarios naturally involve heavy-tailed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-05 Chenlu Ye , Yujia Jin , Alekh Agarwal , Tong Zhang

We study a linear contextual optimization problem where a decision maker has access to historical data and contextual features to learn a cost prediction model aimed at minimizing decision error. We adopt the predict-then-optimize framework…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-09 Omar Bennouna , Jiawei Zhang , Saurabh Amin , Asuman Ozdaglar

We consider the contextual bandit problem on general action and context spaces, where the learner's rewards depend on their selected actions and an observable context. This generalizes the standard multi-armed bandit to the case where side…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-03 Moise Blanchard , Steve Hanneke , Patrick Jaillet

We study Pareto optimality in multi-objective multi-armed bandit by providing a formulation of adversarial multi-objective multi-armed bandit and defining its Pareto regrets that can be applied to both stochastic and adversarial settings.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-01 Mengfan Xu , Diego Klabjan

We study the offline contextual bandit problem, where we aim to acquire an optimal policy using observational data. However, this data usually contains two deficiencies: (i) some variables that confound actions are not observed, and (ii)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Siyu Chen , Yitan Wang , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

We develop the first general semi-bandit algorithm that simultaneously achieves $\mathcal{O}(\log T)$ regret for stochastic environments and $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret for adversarial environments without knowledge of the regime or the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-27 Julian Zimmert , Haipeng Luo , Chen-Yu Wei

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Manhin Poon , XiangXiang Dai , Xutong Liu , Fang Kong , John C. S. Lui , Jinhang Zuo

We prove that two popular linear contextual bandit algorithms, OFUL and Thompson Sampling, can be made efficient using Frequent Directions, a deterministic online sketching technique. More precisely, we show that a sketch of size $m$ allows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Ilja Kuzborskij , Leonardo Cella , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

We study the combinatorial semi-bandit problem where an agent selects a subset of base arms and receives individual feedback. While this generalizes the classical multi-armed bandit and has broad applicability, its scalability is limited by…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-27 Jung-hun Kim , Milan Vojnović , Min-hwan Oh

This paper investigates the problem of non-stationary linear bandits, where the unknown regression parameter is evolving over time. Existing studies develop various algorithms and show that they enjoy an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-23 Peng Zhao , Lijun Zhang , Yuan Jiang , Zhi-Hua Zhou

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Wei Min Loh , Sajib Kumer Sinha , Ankur Agarwal , Pascal Poupart

We create a computationally tractable algorithm for contextual bandits with continuous actions having unknown structure. Our reduction-style algorithm composes with most supervised learning representations. We prove that it works in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-07 Maryam Majzoubi , Chicheng Zhang , Rajan Chari , Akshay Krishnamurthy , John Langford , Aleksandrs Slivkins

We design new differentially private algorithms for the problems of adversarial bandits and bandits with expert advice. For adversarial bandits, we give a simple and efficient conversion of any non-private bandit algorithm to a private…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Hilal Asi , Vinod Raman , Kunal Talwar

When data are collected adaptively, such as in bandit algorithms, classical statistical approaches such as ordinary least squares and $M$-estimation will often fail to achieve asymptotic normality. Although recent lines of work have…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-10 James Leiner , Robin Dunn , Aaditya Ramdas