Related papers: Contextual Pandora's Box
Decision making under uncertain environments in the maximization of expected reward while minimizing its risk is one of the ubiquitous problems in many subjects. Here, we introduce a novel problem setting in stochastic bandit optimization…
Contextual dynamic pricing aims to set personalized prices based on sequential interactions with customers. At each time period, a customer who is interested in purchasing a product comes to the platform. The customer's valuation for the…
We study a fundamental stochastic selection problem involving $n$ independent random variables, each of which can be queried at some cost. Given a tolerance level $\delta$, the goal is to find a value that is $\delta$-approximately minimum…
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…
Bandits with covariates, a.k.a. contextual bandits, address situations where optimal actions (or arms) at a given time $t$, depend on a context $x_t$, e.g., a new patient's medical history, a consumer's past purchases. While it is…
The paper studies a large-scale order fulfillment problem for a leading e-commerce company in the United States. The challenge involves selecting fulfillment centers and shipping carriers with observational data only to efficiently process…
In many web applications, a recommendation is not a single item suggested to a user but a list of possibly interesting contents that may be ranked in some contexts. The combinatorial bandit problem has been studied quite extensively these…
In this paper, we study Contextual Unsupervised Sequential Selection (USS), a new variant of the stochastic contextual bandits problem where the loss of an arm cannot be inferred from the observed feedback. In our setup, arms are associated…
We address the challenge of sequential data-driven decision-making under context distributional uncertainty. This problem arises in numerous real-world scenarios where the learner optimizes black-box objective functions in the presence of…
Thanks to the power of representation learning, neural contextual bandit algorithms demonstrate remarkable performance improvement against their classical counterparts. But because their exploration has to be performed in the entire neural…
Decision theories offer principled methods for making choices under various types of uncertainty. Algorithms that implement these theories have been successfully applied to a wide range of real-world problems, including materials and drug…
We consider the problem of contextual kernel bandits with stochastic contexts, where the underlying reward function belongs to a known Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). We study this problem under the additional constraint of joint…
Algorithms with (machine-learned) predictions is a powerful framework for combining traditional worst-case algorithms with modern machine learning. However, the vast majority of work in this space assumes that the prediction itself is…
We consider the problem of online allocation subject to a long-term fairness penalty. Contrary to existing works, however, we do not assume that the decision-maker observes the protected attributes -- which is often unrealistic in practice.…
A central problem in business concerns the optimal allocation of limited resources to a set of available tasks, where the payoff of these tasks is inherently uncertain. In credit card fraud detection, for instance, a bank can only assign a…
A major research direction in contextual bandits is to develop algorithms that are computationally efficient, yet support flexible, general-purpose function approximation. Algorithms based on modeling rewards have shown strong empirical…
This paper addresses the critical challenge of stochastic latent heterogeneity in online decision-making, where individuals' responses to actions vary not only with observable contexts but also with unobserved, randomly realized subgroups.…
We consider a new setting of online clustering of contextual cascading bandits, an online learning problem where the underlying cluster structure over users is unknown and needs to be learned from a random prefix feedback. More precisely, a…
Precision oncology, the genetic sequencing of tumors to identify druggable targets, has emerged as the standard of care in the treatment of many cancers. Nonetheless, due to the pace of therapy development and variability in patient…
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…