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Related papers: Contextual Pandora's Box

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We study here the problem of learning the exploration exploitation trade-off in the contextual bandit problem with linear reward function setting. In the traditional algorithms that solve the contextual bandit problem, the exploration is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-06 Djallel Bouneffouf , Emmanuelle Claeys

In this paper, we investigate the stochastic contextual bandit with general function space and graph feedback. We propose an algorithm that addresses this problem by adapting to both the underlying graph structures and reward gaps. To the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Xueping Gong , Jiheng Zhang

Stochastic linear contextual bandit algorithms have substantial applications in practice, such as recommender systems, online advertising, clinical trials, etc. Recent works show that optimal bandit algorithms are vulnerable to adversarial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-31 Qin Ding , Cho-Jui Hsieh , James Sharpnack

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-06 Rong Jiang , Cong Ma

Volunteer-based food rescue platforms tackle food waste by matching surplus food to communities in need. These platforms face the dual problem of maintaining volunteer engagement and maximizing the food rescued. Existing algorithms to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Ariana Tang , Naveen Raman , Fei Fang , Zheyuan Ryan Shi

Combinatorial multi-armed bandits provide a fundamental online decision-making environment where a decision-maker interacts with an environment across $T$ time steps, each time selecting an action and learning the cost of that action. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Gerdus Benadè , Rathish Das , Thomas Lavastida

We introduce a new stochastic smoothing perspective to study adversarial contextual bandit problems. We propose a general algorithm template that represents random perturbation based algorithms and identify several perturbation…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-12 Young Hun Jung , Ambuj Tewari

This paper studies a sequential decision problem where payoff distributions are known and where the riskiness of payoffs matters. Equivalently, it studies sequential choice from a repeated set of independent lotteries. The decision-maker is…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-01-02 Zengjing Chen , Larry G. Epstein , Guodong Zhang

We consider an online decision making setting known as contextual bandit problem, and propose an approach for improving contextual bandit performance by using an adaptive feature extraction (representation learning) based on online…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Baihan Lin , Djallel Bouneffouf , Guillermo Cecchi , Irina Rish

In many bandit problems, the maximal reward achievable by a policy is often unknown in advance. We consider the problem of estimating the optimal policy value in the sublinear data regime before the optimal policy is even learnable. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Jonathan N. Lee , Weihao Kong , Aldo Pacchiano , Vidya Muthukumar , Emma Brunskill

We study the problem of corralling stochastic bandit algorithms, that is combining multiple bandit algorithms designed for a stochastic environment, with the goal of devising a corralling algorithm that performs almost as well as the best…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Raman Arora , Teodor V. Marinov , Mehryar Mohri

Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving real-world decision making problems. In practice, collecting a contextual bandit's feedback from different domains may involve different costs. For example, measuring drug reaction from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Ziyan Wang , Xiaoming Huo , Hao Wang

We consider Contextual Bandits with Concave Rewards (CBCR), a multi-objective bandit problem where the desired trade-off between the rewards is defined by a known concave objective function, and the reward vector depends on an observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Virginie Do , Elvis Dohmatob , Matteo Pirotta , Alessandro Lazaric , Nicolas Usunier

We consider the problem of contextual bandits with stochastic experts, which is a variation of the traditional stochastic contextual bandit with experts problem. In our problem setting, we assume access to a class of stochastic experts,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-04 Rajat Sen , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Nihal Sharma , Sanjay Shakkottai

Designing efficient general-purpose contextual bandit algorithms that work with large -- or even continuous -- action spaces would facilitate application to important scenarios such as information retrieval, recommendation systems, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Yinglun Zhu , Paul Mineiro

We consider the classical problem of sequential resource allocation where a decision maker must repeatedly divide a budget between several resources, each with diminishing returns. This can be recast as a specific stochastic optimization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-01-17 Xavier Fontaine , Shie Mannor , Vianney Perchet

We give an oracle-based algorithm for the adversarial contextual bandit problem, where either contexts are drawn i.i.d. or the sequence of contexts is known a priori, but where the losses are picked adversarially. Our algorithm is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-02 Vasilis Syrgkanis , Haipeng Luo , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Robert E. Schapire

Contextual MDPs are powerful tools with wide applicability in areas from biostatistics to machine learning. However, specializing them to offline datasets has been challenging due to a lack of robust, theoretically backed methods. Our work…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-06 Riddhiman Bhattacharyya , Sayak Chakrabarty , Imon Banerjee

In sequential search, alternatives are tested until the true class is found. Standard proper scoring rules like log loss are local, ignoring the ranking of competitors and misaligning model evaluation with search utility. We show that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Gerardo A. Flores , Yash Deshpande , Jannis R. Brea , Ashia C. Wilson

We introduce a new model of stochastic bandits with adversarial corruptions which aims to capture settings where most of the input follows a stochastic pattern but some fraction of it can be adversarially changed to trick the algorithm,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-28 Thodoris Lykouris , Vahab Mirrokni , Renato Paes Leme