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Search and recommendation systems, such as search engines, recruiting tools, online marketplaces, news, and social media, output ranked lists of content, products, and sometimes, people. Credit ratings, standardized tests, risk assessments…
Multi-armed bandit algorithms have become a reference solution for handling the explore/exploit dilemma in recommender systems, and many other important real-world problems, such as display advertisement. However, such algorithms usually…
We study an interesting variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, called the Fair-SMAB problem, where each arm is required to be pulled for at least a given fraction of the total available rounds. We investigate the interplay…
We present a new algorithm for the contextual bandit learning problem, where the learner repeatedly takes one of $K$ actions in response to the observed context, and observes the reward only for that chosen action. Our method assumes access…
We study a repeated contracting setting in which a Principal adaptively chooses amongst $k$ Agents at each of $T$ rounds. The Agents are non-myopic, and so a mechanism for the Principal induces a $T$-round extensive form game amongst the…
We study the probabilistic assignment of items to platforms that satisfies both group and individual fairness constraints. Each item belongs to specific groups and has a preference ordering over platforms. Each platform enforces group…
While sequential task assignment for a single agent has been widely studied, such problems in a multi-agent setting, where the agents have heterogeneous task preferences or capabilities, remain less well-characterized. We study a…
Algorithmic decision systems are increasingly used in areas such as hiring, school admission, or loan approval. Typically, these systems rely on labeled data for training a classification model. However, in many scenarios, ground-truth…
Contextual bandits serve as a fundamental model for many sequential decision making tasks. The most popular theoretically justified approaches are based on the optimism principle. While these algorithms can be practical, they are known to…
We study the problem of model selection in bandit scenarios in the presence of nested policy classes, with the goal of obtaining simultaneous adversarial and stochastic ("best of both worlds") high-probability regret guarantees. Our…
The use of dynamic pricing by profit-maximizing firms gives rise to demand fairness concerns, measured by discrepancies in consumer groups' demand responses to a given pricing strategy. Notably, dynamic pricing may result in buyer…
In the context of multi-agent multi-armed bandits (MA-MAB), fairness is often reduced to outcomes: maximizing welfare, reducing inequality, or balancing utilities. However, evidence in psychology, economics, and Rawlsian theory suggests…
Recommender systems relying on contextual multi-armed bandits continuously improve relevant item recommendations by taking into account the contextual information. The objective of bandit algorithms is to learn the best arm (e.g., best item…
We consider a remote contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) problem, in which the decision-maker observes the context and the reward, but must communicate the actions to be taken by the agents over a rate-limited communication channel. This…
We consider bandit problems involving a large (possibly infinite) collection of arms, in which the expected reward of each arm is a linear function of an $r$-dimensional random vector $\mathbf{Z} \in \mathbb{R}^r$, where $r \geq 2$. The…
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly powerful and accessible to human users, ensuring fairness across diverse demographic groups, i.e., group fairness, is a critical ethical concern. However, current fairness and bias…
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…
Motivated by online recommendation systems, we propose the problem of finding the optimal policy in multitask contextual bandits when a small fraction $\alpha < 1/2$ of tasks (users) are arbitrary and adversarial. The remaining fraction of…
Meritocratic systems, from admissions to hiring, aim to impartially reward skill and effort. Yet persistent disparities across race, gender, and class challenge this ideal. Some attribute these gaps to structural inequality; others to…
We study a novel heterogeneous multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem with a cluster structure induced by stochastic block models, influencing not only graph topology, but also reward heterogeneity. Specifically, agents are distributed on…