Related papers: Contextual Bandits with Smooth Regret: Efficient L…
Contextual bandits are a central framework for sequential decision-making, with applications ranging from recommendation systems to clinical trials. While nonparametric methods can flexibly model complex reward structures, they suffer from…
Bandit learning is characterized by the tension between long-term exploration and short-term exploitation. However, as has recently been noted, in settings in which the choices of the learning algorithm correspond to important decisions…
We study linear contextual bandits with access to a large, confounded, offline dataset that was sampled from some fixed policy. We show that this problem is closely related to a variant of the bandit problem with side information. We…
Learning from human feedback plays an important role in aligning generative models, such as large language models (LLM). However, the effectiveness of this approach can be influenced by adversaries, who may intentionally provide misleading…
Contextual bandit algorithms often estimate reward models to inform decision-making. However, true rewards can contain action-independent redundancies that are not relevant for decision-making. We show it is more data-efficient to estimate…
We develop the first general semi-bandit algorithm that simultaneously achieves $\mathcal{O}(\log T)$ regret for stochastic environments and $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret for adversarial environments without knowledge of the regime or the…
We consider stochastic sequential learning problems where the learner can observe the \textit{average reward of several actions}. Such a setting is interesting in many applications involving monitoring and surveillance, where the set of the…
We initiate the study of learning in contextual bandits with the help of loss predictors. The main question we address is whether one can improve over the minimax regret $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ for learning over $T$ rounds, when the total…
We study regret minimization in a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting and establish a fundamental trade-off between the regret suffered under an algorithm, and its statistical robustness. Considering broad classes of underlying arms'…
We consider stochastic multi-armed bandit problems where the expected reward is a Lipschitz function of the arm, and where the set of arms is either discrete or continuous. For discrete Lipschitz bandits, we derive asymptotic problem…
Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the strategy deployed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. Further, often we have only partial information on the state of the system. We study the…
Contextual bandits have emerged as a cornerstone in reinforcement learning, enabling systems to make decisions with partial feedback. However, as contexts grow in complexity, traditional bandit algorithms can face challenges in adequately…
We show that learning algorithms satisfying a $\textit{low approximate regret}$ property experience fast convergence to approximate optimality in a large class of repeated games. Our property, which simply requires that each learner has…
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…
We introduce Conformal Bandits, a novel framework integrating Conformal Prediction (CP) into bandit problems, a classic paradigm for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. Traditional regret-minimisation bandit strategies like…
Leveraging offline data is an attractive way to accelerate online sequential decision-making. However, it is crucial to account for latent states in users or environments in the offline data, and latent bandits form a compelling model for…
Typical contextual bandit algorithms assume that the rewards at each round lie in some fixed range $[0, R]$, and their regret scales polynomially with this reward range $R$. However, many practical scenarios naturally involve heavy-tailed…
We consider the regret minimization task in a dueling bandits problem with context information. In every round of the sequential decision problem, the learner makes a context-dependent selection of two choice alternatives (arms) to be…
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…
We describe a novel algorithm for noisy global optimisation and continuum-armed bandits, with good convergence properties over any continuous reward function having finitely many polynomial maxima. Over such functions, our algorithm…