Related papers: Instance-optimal PAC Algorithms for Contextual Ban…
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…
We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem motivated by ``large'' action spaces, and endowed with a population of arms containing exactly $K$ arm-types, each characterized by a distinct mean reward. The decision maker is…
We study bandit best-arm identification with arbitrary and potentially adversarial rewards. A simple random uniform learner obtains the optimal rate of error in the adversarial scenario. However, this type of strategy is suboptimal when the…
We consider the stochastic contextual bandit problem under the high dimensional linear model. We focus on the case where the action space is finite and random, with each action associated with a randomly generated contextual covariate. This…
Nonparametric contextual bandit is an important model of sequential decision making problems. Under $\alpha$-Tsybakov margin condition, existing research has established a regret bound of $\tilde{O}\left(T^{1-\frac{\alpha+1}{d+2}}\right)$…
We examine a multi-armed bandit problem with contextual information, where the objective is to ensure that each arm receives a minimum aggregated reward across contexts while simultaneously maximizing the total cumulative reward. This…
Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…
We study contextual bandits with budget and time constraints, referred to as constrained contextual bandits.The time and budget constraints significantly complicate the exploration and exploitation tradeoff because they introduce complex…
We design and implement an adaptive experiment (a ``contextual bandit'') to learn a targeted treatment assignment policy, where the goal is to use a participant's survey responses to determine which charity to expose them to in a donation…
In this paper we initiate a study of non parametric contextual bandits under shape constraints on the mean reward function. Specifically, we study a setting where the context is one dimensional, and the mean reward function is isotonic with…
We provide the first oracle efficient sublinear regret algorithms for adversarial versions of the contextual bandit problem. In this problem, the learner repeatedly makes an action on the basis of a context and receives reward for the…
We consider the problem of near-optimal arm identification in the fixed confidence setting of the infinitely armed bandit problem when nothing is known about the arm reservoir distribution. We (1) introduce a PAC-like framework within which…
A contextual bandit problem is studied in a highly non-stationary environment, which is ubiquitous in various recommender systems due to the time-varying interests of users. Two models with disjoint and hybrid payoffs are considered to…
Learning paradigms based purely on offline data as well as those based solely on sequential online learning have been well-studied in the literature. In this paper, we consider combining offline data with online learning, an area less…
We study a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, where at each time step, the player observes an independently sampled context that determines the arms' mean rewards. However, playing an arm blocks it (across all contexts) for a…
We investigate contextual bandits in the presence of side-observations across arms in order to design recommendation algorithms for users connected via social networks. Users in social networks respond to their friends' activity, and hence…
Motivated by models of human decision making proposed to explain commonly observed deviations from conventional expected value preferences, we formulate two stochastic multi-armed bandit problems with distorted probabilities on the reward…
We consider the best arm identification problem in the stochastic multi-armed bandit framework where each arm has a tiny probability of realizing large rewards while with overwhelming probability the reward is zero. A key application of…
This study investigates the contextual best arm identification (BAI) problem, aiming to design an adaptive experiment to identify the best treatment arm conditioned on contextual information (covariates). We consider a decision-maker who…
We consider the problem of designing contextual bandit algorithms in the ``cross-learning'' setting of Balseiro et al., where the learner observes the loss for the action they play in all possible contexts, not just the context of the…