Related papers: Extending Open Bandit Pipeline to Simulate Industr…
Most online platforms strive to learn from interactions with users, and many engage in exploration: making potentially suboptimal choices for the sake of acquiring new information. We study the interplay between exploration and competition:…
Personalized recommendations for new users, also known as the cold-start problem, can be formulated as a contextual bandit problem. Existing contextual bandit algorithms generally rely on features alone to capture user variability. Such…
Modern deep learning methods are very sensitive to many hyperparameters, and, due to the long training times of state-of-the-art models, vanilla Bayesian hyperparameter optimization is typically computationally infeasible. On the other…
In academic literature, recommender systems are often evaluated on the task of next-item prediction. The procedure aims to give an answer to the question: "Given the natural sequence of user-item interactions up to time t, can we predict…
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…
Bandit algorithms are widely used in sequential decision problems to maximize the cumulative reward. One potential application is mobile health, where the goal is to promote the user's health through personalized interventions based on user…
In online learning, the data is provided in a sequential order, and the goal of the learner is to make online decisions to minimize overall regrets. This note is concerned with continuous-time models and algorithms for several online…
We revisit the question of reducing online learning to approximate optimization of the offline problem. In this setting, we give two algorithms with near-optimal performance in the full information setting: they guarantee optimal regret and…
In this work, we present and study a new framework for online learning in systems with multiple users that provide user anonymity. Specifically, we extend the notion of bandits to obey the standard $k$-anonymity constraint by requiring each…
Standard approaches to decision-making under uncertainty focus on sequential exploration of the space of decisions. However, \textit{simultaneously} proposing a batch of decisions, which leverages available resources for parallel…
The rapid proliferation of learning systems in an arbitrarily changing environment mandates the need for managing tensions between exploration and exploitation. This work proposes a quantum-inspired bandit learning approach for the…
Stochastic optimization is a widely used approach for optimization under uncertainty, where uncertain input parameters are modeled by random variables. Exact or approximation algorithms have been obtained for several fundamental problems in…
Residential loads have great potential to enhance the efficiency and reliability of electricity systems via demand response (DR) programs. One major challenge in residential DR is to handle the unknown and uncertain customer behaviors.…
The Multi-armed bandit offer the advantage to learn and exploit the already learnt knowledge at the same time. This capability allows this approach to be applied in different domains, going from clinical trials where the goal is…
Recent advances in contextual bandit optimization and reinforcement learning have garnered interest in applying these methods to real-world sequential decision making problems. Real-world applications frequently have constraints with…
We develop a novel latent-bandit algorithm for tackling the cold-start problem for new users joining a recommender system. This new algorithm significantly outperforms the state of the art, simultaneously achieving both higher accuracy and…
Bandits with feedback graphs are powerful online learning models that interpolate between the full information and classic bandit problems, capturing many real-life applications. A recent work by Zhang et al. (2023) studies the contextual…
Contextual bandit algorithms have become popular for online recommendation systems such as Digg, Yahoo! Buzz, and news recommendation in general. \emph{Offline} evaluation of the effectiveness of new algorithms in these applications is…
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…
Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…