Related papers: Pessimism for Offline Linear Contextual Bandits us…
We consider the contextual bandit problem where at each time, the agent only has access to a noisy version of the context and the error variance (or an estimator of this variance). This setting is motivated by a wide range of applications…
Traditional online learning models are typically initialized from scratch. By contrast, contemporary real-world applications often have access to historical datasets that can potentially enhanced the online learning processes. We study how…
We address the problem of conformal selection, where an agent must select a minimal subset of options to ensure that at least one ``success'' is identified with a pre-specified target probability $\phi$. While traditional online conformal…
Offline reinforcement learning, which seeks to utilize offline/historical data to optimize sequential decision-making strategies, has gained surging prominence in recent studies. Due to the advantage that appropriate function approximators…
The analysis of online least squares estimation is at the heart of many stochastic sequential decision making problems. We employ tools from the self-normalized processes to provide a simple and self-contained proof of a tail bound of a…
We study the offline reinforcement learning (offline RL) problem, where the goal is to learn a reward-maximizing policy in an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP) using the data coming from a policy $\mu$. In particular, we consider the…
Adapting to a priori unknown noise level is a very important but challenging problem in sequential decision-making as efficient exploration typically requires knowledge of the noise level, which is often loosely specified. We report…
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…
Many bandit systems are deployed with offline historical data, such as past logs from earlier policies. Using these data can reduce early online exploration when they remain informative for the online problem. When the offline and online…
Learning from human feedback plays an important role in aligning generative models, such as large language models (LLM). However, the effectiveness of this approach can be influenced by adversaries, who may intentionally provide misleading…
In the stochastic contextual bandit setting, regret-minimizing algorithms have been extensively researched, but their instance-minimizing best-arm identification counterparts remain seldom studied. In this work, we focus on the stochastic…
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…
We study offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn an optimal policy based on a dataset collected a priori. Due to the lack of further interactions with the environment, offline RL suffers from the insufficient coverage of…
We address policy learning with logged data in contextual bandits. Current offline-policy learning algorithms are mostly based on inverse propensity score (IPS) weighting requiring the logging policy to have \emph{full support} i.e. a…
We study how to make decisions that minimize Bayesian regret in offline linear bandits. Prior work suggests that one must take actions with maximum lower confidence bound (LCB) on their reward. We argue that the reliance on LCB is…
The principle of optimism in the face of uncertainty is one of the most widely used and successful ideas in multi-armed bandits and reinforcement learning. However, existing optimistic algorithms (primarily UCB and its variants) often…
Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving many real-world interactive machine learning problems. Despite multiple recent successes on statistically and computationally efficient methods, the practical behavior of these…
We study the linear contextual bandit problem in the presence of adversarial corruption, where the reward at each round is corrupted by an adversary, and the corruption level (i.e., the sum of corruption magnitudes over the horizon) is…
Linear bandits have long been a central topic in online learning, with applications ranging from recommendation systems to adaptive clinical trials. Their general learnability has been established when the objective is to minimise the inner…
We study the problem of online learning in adversarial bandit problems under a partial observability model called off-policy feedback. In this sequential decision making problem, the learner cannot directly observe its rewards, but instead…