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Related papers: Distribution-free Contextual Dynamic Pricing

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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

In many real-world dynamical systems, obtaining precise models of system uncertainty remains a challenge. It may be difficult to estimate noise distributions or robustness bounds, especially when the distributions/robustness bounds vary…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-03-05 Heling Zhang , Lillian J. Ratliff , Roy Dong

We address online learning in complex auction settings, such as sponsored search auctions, where the value of the bidder is unknown to her, evolving in an arbitrary manner and observed only if the bidder wins an allocation. We leverage the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-06-04 Zhe Feng , Chara Podimata , Vasilis Syrgkanis

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

Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-07 Branislav Kveton , Martin Mladenov , Chih-Wei Hsu , Manzil Zaheer , Csaba Szepesvari , Craig Boutilier

Learning to make decisions from observed data in dynamic environments remains a problem of fundamental importance in a number of fields, from artificial intelligence and robotics, to medicine and finance. This paper concerns the problem of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-04 Jack Umenberger , Thomas B. Schön

In this paper we investigate a dynamic pricing model for constant demand elasticity where customers have a probability distribution on the number of items they order. This is a generalization from standard models which restrict customers to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-03-01 Nyles Breecher , Richard Stockbridge

Humans often juggle multiple, sometimes conflicting objectives and shift their priorities as circumstances change, rather than following a fixed objective function. In contrast, most computational decision-making and multi-objective RL…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Xianwei Cao , Dou Quan , Zhenliang Zhang , Shuang Wang

In this paper, we consider the problem of resource congestion control for competing online learning agents. On the basis of non-cooperative game as the model for the interaction between the agents, and the noisy online mirror ascent as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-22 Ezra Tampubolon , Holger Boche

In today's economy, selling a new zero-marginal cost product is a real challenge, as it is difficult to determine a product's "correct" sales price based on its profit and dissemination. As an example, think of the price of a new app or…

Trading and Market Microstructure · Quantitative Finance 2021-08-03 Daniel Fraiman

This paper explores the application of a reinforcement learning (RL) framework using the Q-Learning algorithm to enhance dynamic pricing strategies in the retail sector. Unlike traditional pricing methods, which often rely on static demand…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Mohit Apte , Ketan Kale , Pranav Datar , Pratiksha Deshmukh

Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-18 Maria Dimakopoulou , Zhengyuan Zhou , Susan Athey , Guido Imbens

Personalized services are central to today's digital economy, and their sequential decisions are often modeled as contextual bandits. Modern applications pose two main challenges: high-dimensional covariates and the need for nonparametric…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-07 Wenjia Wang , Qingwen Zhang , Xiaowei Zhang

Machine learning algorithms such as linear regression, SVM and neural network have played an increasingly important role in the process of scientific discovery. However, none of them is both interpretable and accurate on nonlinear datasets.…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2017-10-31 Chengyu Liu , Wei Wang

We develop a novel framework for costly information acquisition in which a decision-maker learns about an unobserved state by choosing a signal distribution, with the cost of information determined by the distribution of noise in the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-03-27 Peter Achim , Kemal Ozbek

Recent advances in learning techniques have garnered attention for their applicability to a diverse range of real-world sequential decision-making problems. Yet, many practical applications have critical constraints for operation in real…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Jose A. Ayala-Romero , Andres Garcia-Saavedra , Xavier Costa-Perez

As the adoption of federated learning increases for learning from sensitive data local to user devices, it is natural to ask if the learning can be done using implicit signals generated as users interact with the applications of interest,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Alekh Agarwal , H. Brendan McMahan , Zheng Xu

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

As e-commerce expands, delivering real-time personalized recommendations from vast catalogs poses a critical challenge for retail platforms. Maximizing revenue requires careful consideration of both individual customer characteristics and…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Seong Jin Lee , Will Wei Sun , Yufeng Liu

Personalised discount codes provide a powerful mechanism for managing customer relationships and operational spend in e-commerce. Bandits are well suited for this product area, given the partial information nature of the problem, as well as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Jason Shuo Zhang , Benjamin Howson , Panayiota Savva , Eleanor Loh