Related papers: Provably and Practically Efficient Neural Contextu…
We use surrogate losses to obtain several new regret bounds and new algorithms for contextual bandit learning. Using the ramp loss, we derive new margin-based regret bounds in terms of standard sequential complexity measures of a benchmark…
Many efficient algorithms with strong theoretical guarantees have been proposed for the contextual multi-armed bandit problem. However, applying these algorithms in practice can be difficult because they require domain expertise to build…
This paper studies bandit problems where an agent has access to offline data that might be utilized to potentially improve the estimation of each arm's reward distribution. A major obstacle in this setting is the existence of compound…
Virtual support agents have grown in popularity as a way for businesses to provide better and more accessible customer service. Some challenges in this domain include ambiguous user queries as well as changing support topics and user…
We study the kernelized bandit problem, that involves designing an adaptive strategy for querying a noisy zeroth-order-oracle to efficiently learn about the optimizer of an unknown function $f$ with a norm bounded by $M<\infty$ in a…
Learning good interventions in a causal graph can be modelled as a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with side-information. First, we study this problem when interventions are more expensive than observations and a budget is specified.…
Computationally efficient contextual bandits are often based on estimating a predictive model of rewards given contexts and arms using past data. However, when the reward model is not well-specified, the bandit algorithm may incur…
Contextual linear bandits is a rich and theoretically important model that has many practical applications. Recently, this setup gained a lot of interest in applications over wireless where communication constraints can be a performance…
We study the causal bandit problem when the causal graph is unknown and develop an efficient algorithm for finding the parent node of the reward node using atomic interventions. We derive the exact equation for the expected number of…
In this paper, we tackle the computational efficiency of kernelized UCB algorithms in contextual bandits. While standard methods require a O(CT^3) complexity where T is the horizon and the constant C is related to optimizing the UCB rule,…
We study a class of adversarial bandit optimization problems in which the loss functions may be non-convex and non-smooth. In each round, the learner observes a loss that consists of an underlying linear component together with an…
We present substantial evidence demonstrating the benefits of integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with a Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit framework. Contextual bandits have been widely used in recommendation systems to generate…
We study how to learn optimal interventions sequentially given causal information represented as a causal graph along with associated conditional distributions. Causal modeling is useful in real world problems like online advertisement…
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…
PAC-Bayes has recently re-emerged as an effective theory with which one can derive principled learning algorithms with tight performance guarantees. However, applications of PAC-Bayes to bandit problems are relatively rare, which is a great…
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…
We study contextual bandits with nonlinear and path-dependent rewards through a novel signature-transform-based approach. Leveraging the universal nonlinearity property of signatures, we approximate continuous path-dependent reward…
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,…
In this paper we adapt the nearest neighbour rule to the contextual bandit problem. Our algorithm handles the fully adversarial setting in which no assumptions at all are made about the data-generation process. When combined with a…
Contextual bandits can solve a huge range of real-world problems. However, current popular algorithms to solve them either rely on linear models, or unreliable uncertainty estimation in non-linear models, which are required to deal with the…