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Efficient exploration in bandits is a fundamental online learning problem. We propose a variant of Thompson sampling that learns to explore better as it interacts with bandit instances drawn from an unknown prior. The algorithm meta-learns…

Policy inference plays an essential role in the contextual bandit problem. In this paper, we use empirical likelihood to develop a Bayesian inference method for the joint analysis of multiple contextual bandit policies in finite sample…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-12 Jiangrong Ouyang , Mingming Gong , Howard Bondell

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

Contextual bandits are widely used in industrial personalization systems. These online learning frameworks learn a treatment assignment policy in the presence of treatment effects that vary with the observed contextual features of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-11 Claudia Roberts , Maria Dimakopoulou , Qifeng Qiao , Ashok Chandrashekhar , Tony Jebara

Recommender systems are a ubiquitous feature of online platforms. Increasingly, they are explicitly tasked with increasing users' long-term satisfaction. In this context, we study a content exploration task, which we formalize as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Thomas M. McDonald , Lucas Maystre , Mounia Lalmas , Daniel Russo , Kamil Ciosek

Delivering treatment recommendations via pervasive electronic devices such as mobile phones has the potential to be a viable and scalable treatment medium for long-term health behavior management. But active experimentation of treatment…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-08-24 Mawulolo K. Ameko , Miranda L. Beltzer , Lihua Cai , Mehdi Boukhechba , Bethany A. Teachman , Laura E. Barnes

A central problem in sequential decision making is to develop algorithms that are practical and computationally efficient, yet support the use of flexible, general-purpose models. Focusing on the contextual bandit problem, recent progress…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Yinglun Zhu , Dylan J. Foster , John Langford , Paul Mineiro

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 study contextual bandit (CB) problems, where the user can sometimes respond with the best action in a given context. Such an interaction arises, for example, in text prediction or autocompletion settings, where a poor suggestion is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-09 Alekh Agarwal , Claudio Gentile , Teodor V. Marinov

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

In this paper, we study utilizing neural networks for the exploitation and exploration of contextual multi-armed bandits. Contextual multi-armed bandits have been studied for decades with various applications. To solve the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yikun Ban , Yuchen Yan , Arindam Banerjee , Jingrui He

Personalization enables businesses to learn customer preferences from past interactions and thus to target individual customers with more relevant content. We consider the problem of predicting the optimal promotional offer for a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-02 Aleksey A. Kocherzhenko , Nirmal Sobha Kartha , Tengfei Li , Hsin-Yi , Shih , Marco Mandic , Mike Fuller , Arshak Navruzyan

We investigate the feasibility of learning from a mix of both fully-labeled supervised data and contextual bandit data. We specifically consider settings in which the underlying learning signal may be different between these two data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Chicheng Zhang , Alekh Agarwal , Hal Daumé , John Langford , Sahand N Negahban

Contextual dueling bandits, where a learner compares two options based on context and receives feedback indicating which was preferred, extends classic dueling bandits by incorporating contextual information for decision-making and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-10 Xuheng Li , Heyang Zhao , Quanquan Gu

The bandit paradigm provides a unified modeling framework for problems that require decision-making under uncertainty. Because many business metrics can be viewed as rewards (a.k.a. utilities) that result from actions, bandit algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-03 Bram van den Akker , Olivier Jeunen , Ying Li , Ben London , Zahra Nazari , Devesh Parekh

Online recommendation/advertising is ubiquitous in web business. Image displaying is considered as one of the most commonly used formats to interact with customers. Contextual multi-armed bandit has shown success in the application of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-11 Yikun Ban , Jingrui He

Taking advantage of contextual information can potentially boost the performance of recommender systems. In the era of big data, such side information often has several dimensions. Thus, developing decision-making algorithms to cope with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-26 Saeed Ghoorchian , Evgenii Kortukov , Setareh Maghsudi

We introduce a novel approach for batch selection in Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) training, leveraging combinatorial bandit algorithms. Our methodology focuses on optimizing the learning process in the presence of label noise, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Michal Lisicki , Mihai Nica , Graham W. Taylor

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

Contextual bandits with linear payoffs, which are also known as linear bandits, provide a powerful alternative for solving practical problems of sequential decisions, e.g., online advertisements. In the era of big data, contextual data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-21 Xiaotian Yu