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Personalized recommendations for new users, also known as the cold-start problem, can be formulated as a contextual bandit problem. Existing contextual bandit algorithms generally rely on features alone to capture user variability. Such…

We consider the problem of contextual bandits and imitation learning, where the learner lacks direct knowledge of the executed action's reward. Instead, the learner can actively query an expert at each round to compare two actions and…

The performance of algorithmic decision rules is largely dependent on the quality of training datasets available to them. Biases in these datasets can raise economic and ethical concerns due to the resulting algorithms' disparate treatment…

Traditional curriculum learning proceeds from easy to hard samples, yet defining a reliable notion of difficulty remains elusive. Prior work has used submodular functions to induce difficulty scores in curriculum learning. We reinterpret…

Solutions to address the periodic review inventory control problem with nonstationary random demand, lost sales, and stochastic vendor lead times typically involve making strong assumptions on the dynamics for either approximation or…

We describe MELEE, a meta-learning algorithm for learning a good exploration policy in the interactive contextual bandit setting. Here, an algorithm must take actions based on contexts, and learn based only on a reward signal from the…

A fundamental problem for waveform-agile radar systems is that the true environment is unknown, and transmission policies which perform well for a particular tracking instance may be sub-optimal for another. Additionally, there is a limited…

In this paper, we propose a novel neural exploration strategy in contextual bandits, EE-Net, distinct from the standard UCB-based and TS-based approaches. Contextual multi-armed bandits have been studied for decades with various…

Evaluating the safety of frontier AI systems is an increasingly important concern, helping to measure the capabilities of such models and identify risks before deployment. However, it has been recognised that if AI agents are aware that…

Due to the sparse rewards and high degree of environment variation, reinforcement learning approaches such as Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) are plagued by issues of high variance when applied in complex real world environments.…

Online recommendation services recommend multiple commodities to users. Nowadays, a considerable proportion of users visit e-commerce platforms by mobile devices. Due to the limited screen size of mobile devices, positions of items have a…

Contextual bandits are widely-used in the study of learning-based control policies for finite action spaces. While the problem is well-studied for bandits with perfectly observed context vectors, little is known about the case of…

Contextual bandit algorithms -- a class of multi-armed bandit algorithms that exploit the contextual information -- have been shown to be effective in solving sequential decision making problems under uncertainty. A common assumption…

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have made significant strides in performance on applications such as Go and Atari games. However, developing practical methods to balance exploration and exploitation in complex domains remains…

We propose a new sequential decision-making setting, combining key aspects of two established online learning problems with bandit feedback. The optimal action to play at any given moment is contingent on an underlying changing state which…

We study here the problem of learning the exploration exploitation trade-off in the contextual bandit problem with linear reward function setting. In the traditional algorithms that solve the contextual bandit problem, the exploration is a…

Designing efficient general-purpose contextual bandit algorithms that work with large -- or even continuous -- action spaces would facilitate application to important scenarios such as information retrieval, recommendation systems, and…

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…

Consider a bandit algorithm that recommends actions to self-interested users in a recommendation system. The users are free to choose other actions and need to be incentivized to follow the algorithm's recommendations. While the users…

Task oriented dialog systems often rely on static exploration strategies that do not adapt to dynamic dialog contexts, leading to inefficient exploration and suboptimal performance. We propose DyBBT, a novel dialog policy learning framework…