Related papers: Safe Exploration for Efficient Policy Evaluation a…

This paper is a scoping study to identify current methods used in handling sparse data with contextual bandits in web settings. The area is highly current and state of the art methods are identified. The years 2017-2020 are investigated,…

We consider a bandit problem over a graph where the rewards are not directly observed. Instead, the decision maker can compare two nodes and receive (stochastic) information pertaining to the difference in their value. The graph structure…

This paper presents an approach for data-driven policy refinement in reinforcement learning, specifically designed for safety-critical applications. Our methodology leverages the strengths of data-driven optimization and reinforcement…

We consider a bandit problem which involves sequential sampling from two populations (arms). Each arm produces a noisy reward realization which depends on an observable random covariate. The goal is to maximize cumulative expected reward.…

The multi-armed bandit problem is a classical decision-making problem where an agent has to learn an optimal action balancing exploration and exploitation. Properly managing this trade-off requires a correct assessment of uncertainty; in…

We design and implement an adaptive experiment (a ``contextual bandit'') to learn a targeted treatment assignment policy, where the goal is to use a participant's survey responses to determine which charity to expose them to in a donation…

Given n experiment subjects with potentially heterogeneous covariates and two possible treatments, namely active treatment and control, this paper addresses the fundamental question of determining the optimal accuracy in estimating the…

To unbiasedly evaluate multiple target policies, the dominant approach among RL practitioners is to run and evaluate each target policy separately. However, this evaluation method is far from efficient because samples are not shared across…

In this paper, we explore the use of multi-armed bandit online learning techniques to solve distributed resource selection problems. As an example, we focus on the problem of network selection. Mobile devices often have several wireless…

Most off-policy evaluation methods for contextual bandits have focused on the expected outcome of a policy, which is estimated via methods that at best provide only asymptotic guarantees. However, in many applications, the expectation may…

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…

We consider off-policy selection and learning in contextual bandits, where the learner aims to select or train a reward-maximizing policy using data collected by a fixed behavior policy. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we propose a…

In this paper, we introduce the notion of replicable policies in the context of stochastic bandits, one of the canonical problems in interactive learning. A policy in the bandit environment is called replicable if it pulls, with high…

This paper introduces a new principled approach for off-policy learning in contextual bandits. Unlike previous work, our approach does not derive learning principles from intractable or loose bounds. We analyse the problem through the…

The task of decision-making under uncertainty is daunting, especially for problems which have significant complexity. Healthcare policy makers across the globe are facing problems under challenging constraints, with limited tools to help…

We present a new algorithm for the contextual bandit learning problem, where the learner repeatedly takes one of $K$ actions in response to the observed context, and observes the reward only for that chosen action. Our method assumes access…

Exploration is critical to a reinforcement learning agent's performance in its given environment. Prior exploration methods are often based on using heuristic auxiliary predictions to guide policy behavior, lacking a mathematically-grounded…

We study the problem of real time data capture on social media. Due to the different limitations imposed by those media, but also to the very large amount of information, it is impossible to collect all the data produced by social networks…

We study the problem of infrequent exploration in linear bandits, addressing a significant yet overlooked gap between fully adaptive exploratory methods (e.g., UCB and Thompson Sampling), which explore potentially at every time step, and…

In this report, we survey Bayesian Optimization methods focussed on the Multi-Armed Bandit Problem. We take the help of the paper "Portfolio Allocation for Bayesian Optimization". We report a small literature survey on the acquisition…