Related papers: Simulating Bandit Learning from User Feedback for …
We propose a model for learning with bandit feedback while accounting for deterministically evolving and unobservable states that we call Bandits with Deterministically Evolving States ($B$-$DES$). The workhorse applications of our model…
Personalized web services strive to adapt their services (advertisements, news articles, etc) to individual users by making use of both content and user information. Despite a few recent advances, this problem remains challenging for at…
There are two variants of the classical multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem that have received considerable attention from machine learning researchers in recent years: contextual bandits and simple regret minimization. Contextual bandits are…
Contextual Bandits find important use cases in various real-life scenarios such as online advertising, recommendation systems, healthcare, etc. However, most of the algorithms use flat feature vectors to represent context whereas, in the…
We study the problem of experiment planning with function approximation in contextual bandit problems. In settings where there is a significant overhead to deploying adaptive algorithms -- for example, when the execution of the data…
We develop models to classify desirable evidence and desirable reasoning revisions in student argumentative writing. We explore two ways to improve classifier performance - using the essay context of the revision, and using the feedback…
In linear contextual bandits, the objective is to select actions that maximize cumulative rewards, modeled as a linear function with unknown parameters. Although Thompson Sampling performs well empirically, it does not achieve optimal…
We investigate the recently introduced model of learning with improvements, where agents are allowed to make small changes to their feature values to be warranted a more desirable label. We extensively extend previously published results by…
We study the problem of incentivizing exploration for myopic users in linear bandits, where the users tend to exploit arm with the highest predicted reward instead of exploring. In order to maximize the long-term reward, the system offers…
The correct specification of reward models is a well-known challenge in reinforcement learning. Hand-crafted reward functions often lead to inefficient or suboptimal policies and may not be aligned with user values. Reinforcement learning…
Question answering has seen significant advances in recent times, especially with the introduction of increasingly bigger transformer-based models pre-trained on massive amounts of data. While achieving impressive results on many…
In the stochastic linear contextual bandit setting there exist several minimax procedures for exploration with policies that are reactive to the data being acquired. In practice, there can be a significant engineering overhead to deploy…
Selecting a sample generation scheme from multiple prompt-based generative models, including large language models (LLMs) and prompt-guided image and video generation models, is typically addressed by choosing the model that maximizes an…
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…
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…
We consider a variant of the contextual bandit problem. In standard contextual bandits, when a user arrives we get the user's complete feature vector and then assign a treatment (arm) to that user. In a number of applications (like…
We study how to use naturally available user feedback, such as clicks, to optimize large language model (LLM) pipelines for generating personalized sentences using prompts. Naive approaches, which estimate the policy gradient in the prompt…
Determining what experience to generate to best facilitate learning (i.e. exploration) is one of the distinguishing features and open challenges in reinforcement learning. The advent of distributed agents that interact with parallel…
Existing techniques for training language models can be misaligned with the truth: if we train models with imitation learning, they may reproduce errors that humans make; if we train them to generate text that humans rate highly, they may…
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…