Related papers: Learning the Optimal Recommendation from Explorati…
Contextual dueling bandit is used to model the bandit problems, where a learner's goal is to find the best arm for a given context using observed noisy human preference feedback over the selected arms for the past contexts. However,…
Online platforms in the Internet Economy commonly incorporate recommender systems that recommend products (or "arms") to users (or "agents"). A key challenge in this domain arises from myopic agents who are naturally incentivized to exploit…
In this paper, we investigate a new multi-armed bandit (MAB) online learning model that considers real-world phenomena in many recommender systems: (i) the learning agent cannot pull the arms by itself and thus has to offer rewards to users…
Individual decision-makers consume information revealed by the previous decision makers, and produce information that may help in future decisions. This phenomenon is common in a wide range of scenarios in the Internet economy, as well as…
In the latent bandit problem, the learner has access to reward distributions and -- for the non-stationary variant -- transition models of the environment. The reward distributions are conditioned on the arm and unknown latent states. The…
We consider multi-armed bandit problems in social groups wherein each individual has bounded memory and shares the common goal of learning the best arm/option. We say an individual learns the best option if eventually (as $t \to \infty$) it…
We study the evolution of information in interactive decision making through the lens of a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem. Focusing on a fundamental example where a unique optimal arm outperforms the rest by a fixed margin, we…
We consider the problem of best arm identification in a variant of multi-armed bandits called linked bandits. In a single interaction with linked bandits, multiple arms are played sequentially until one of them receives a positive reward.…
We consider the Max $K$-Armed Bandit problem, where a learning agent is faced with several stochastic arms, each a source of i.i.d. rewards of unknown distribution. At each time step the agent chooses an arm, and observes the reward of the…
Recommender systems relying on contextual multi-armed bandits continuously improve relevant item recommendations by taking into account the contextual information. The objective of bandit algorithms is to learn the best arm (e.g., best item…
Collaborative bandit learning, i.e., bandit algorithms that utilize collaborative filtering techniques to improve sample efficiency in online interactive recommendation, has attracted much research attention as it enjoys the best of both…
The recent advances of conversational recommendations provide a promising way to efficiently elicit users' preferences via conversational interactions. To achieve this, the recommender system conducts conversations with users, asking their…
Learning paradigms based purely on offline data as well as those based solely on sequential online learning have been well-studied in the literature. In this paper, we consider combining offline data with online learning, an area less…
A contextual bandit problem is studied in a highly non-stationary environment, which is ubiquitous in various recommender systems due to the time-varying interests of users. Two models with disjoint and hybrid payoffs are considered to…
Current music recommender systems typically act in a greedy fashion by recommending songs with the highest user ratings. Greedy recommendation, however, is suboptimal over the long term: it does not actively gather information on user…
Stochastic multi-armed bandits are a sequential-decision-making framework, where, at each interaction step, the learner selects an arm and observes a stochastic reward. Within the context of best-arm identification (BAI) problems, the goal…
We consider the best arm identification (BAI) problem in the $K-$armed bandit framework with a modification - the agent is allowed to play a subset of arms at each time slot instead of one arm. Consequently, the agent observes the sample…
Deep Reinforcement Learning has been shown to be very successful in complex games, e.g. Atari or Go. These games have clearly defined rules, and hence allow simulation. In many practical applications, however, interactions with the…
Recommendation systems are a key modern application of machine learning, but they have the downside that they often draw upon sensitive user information in making their predictions. We show how to address this deficiency by basing a…
We consider the query recommendation problem in closed loop interactive learning settings like online information gathering and exploratory analytics. The problem can be naturally modelled using the Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) framework with…