Related papers: Selectively Contextual Bandits

Contextual bandit algorithms are applied in a wide range of domains, from advertising to recommender systems, from clinical trials to education. In many of these domains, malicious agents may have incentives to attack the bandit algorithm…

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 study a variant of causal contextual bandits where the context is chosen based on an initial intervention chosen by the learner. At the beginning of each round, the learner selects an initial action, depending on which a stochastic…

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…

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…

We study nonparametric contextual bandits under batch constraints, where the expected reward for each action is modeled as a smooth function of covariates, and the policy updates are made at the end of each batch of observations. We…

Digital educational technologies offer the potential to customize students' experiences and learn what works for which students, enhancing the technology as more students interact with it. We consider whether and when attempting to discover…

The stochastic contextual bandit problem, which models the trade-off between exploration and exploitation, has many real applications, including recommender systems, online advertising and clinical trials. As many other machine learning…

Contextual bandits are canonical models for sequential decision-making under uncertainty in environments with time-varying components. In this setting, the expected reward of each bandit arm consists of the inner product of an unknown…

We study the problem of using causal models to improve the rate at which good interventions can be learned online in a stochastic environment. Our formalism combines multi-arm bandits and causal inference to model a novel type of bandit…

For a real-world decision-making problem, the reward function often needs to be engineered or learned. A popular approach is to utilize human feedback to learn a reward function for training. The most straightforward way to do so is to ask…

Sequential decision-making algorithms such as multi-armed bandits can find optimal personalized decisions, but are notoriously sample-hungry. In personalized medicine, for example, training a bandit from scratch for every patient is…

Neural contextual bandits are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where subtle perturbations to rewards, actions, or contexts induce suboptimal decisions. We introduce AdvBandit, a black-box adaptive attack that formulates context poisoning…

Personalized recommendation based on multi-arm bandit (MAB) algorithms has shown to lead to high utility and efficiency as it can dynamically adapt the recommendation strategy based on feedback. However, unfairness could incur in…

Delivering treatment recommendations via pervasive electronic devices such as mobile phones has the potential to be a viable and scalable treatment medium for long-term health behavior management. But active experimentation of treatment…

In the classical contextual bandits problem, in each round $t$, a learner observes some context $c$, chooses some action $i$ to perform, and receives some reward $r_{i,t}(c)$. We consider the variant of this problem where in addition to…

A central problem in sequential decision making is to develop algorithms that are practical and computationally efficient, yet support the use of flexible, general-purpose models. Focusing on the contextual bandit problem, recent progress…

We study bandit learning in matching markets, where players and arms constitute the two market sides, and the players' utilities are linear in the arm contexts. In each round, new arms arrive with observable contexts. Then, the algorithm…

We study a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, where at each time step, the player observes an independently sampled context that determines the arms' mean rewards. However, playing an arm blocks it (across all contexts) for a…

Contextual bandits are a common problem faced by machine learning practitioners in domains as diverse as hypothesis testing to product recommendations. There have been a lot of approaches in exploiting rich data representations for…