Related papers: A Contextual Bandit Approach for Value-oriented Pr…
We propose a contextual bandit based model to capture the learning and social welfare goals of a web platform in the presence of myopic users. By using payments to incentivize these agents to explore different items/recommendations, we show…
Recent work shows that when contexts are drawn i.i.d., linear contextual bandits can be reduced to single-context linear bandits. This ``contexts are cheap" perspective is highly advantageous, as it allows for sharper finite-time analyses…
Regressions are commonly used in environmental science and economics to identify causal or associative relationships between variables. In these settings, remote sensing-derived map products increasingly serve as sources of variables,…
Contextual bandits, which leverage the baseline features of sequentially arriving individuals to optimize cumulative rewards while balancing exploration and exploitation, are critical for online decision-making. Existing approaches…
We present and prove properties of a new offline policy evaluator for an exploration learning setting which is superior to previous evaluators. In particular, it simultaneously and correctly incorporates techniques from importance…
Web-based applications such as chatbots, search engines and news recommendations continue to grow in scale and complexity with the recent surge in the adoption of LLMs. Online model selection has thus garnered increasing attention due to…
Optimizing an interactive system against a predefined online metric is particularly challenging, when the metric is computed from user feedback such as clicks and payments. The key challenge is the counterfactual nature: in the case of Web…
This paper introduces a new principled approach for off-policy learning in contextual bandits. Unlike previous work, our approach does not derive learning principles from intractable or loose bounds. We analyse the problem through the…
Evaluating the performance of an ongoing policy plays a vital role in many areas such as medicine and economics, to provide crucial instructions on the early-stop of the online experiment and timely feedback from the environment. Policy…
This paper presents a concise review of Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit (CMAB) methods and introduces an experimental framework for scalable, interpretable offer selection, addressing the challenge of fast-changing offers. The approach models…
We study the problem of estimating the expected reward of the optimal policy in the stochastic disjoint linear bandit setting. We prove that for certain settings it is possible to obtain an accurate estimate of the optimal policy value even…
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…
Contextual sequential decision-making problems play a crucial role in machine learning, encompassing a wide range of downstream applications such as bandits, sequential hypothesis testing and online risk control. These applications often…
We consider contextual bandits with knapsacks, with an underlying structure between rewards generated and cost vectors suffered. We do so motivated by sales with commercial discounts. At each round, given the stochastic i.i.d.\ context…
The feedback that AI systems (e.g., recommender systems, chatbots) collect from user interactions is a crucial source of training data. While short-term feedback (e.g., clicks, engagement) is widely used for training, there is ample…
We consider the stochastic linear (multi-armed) contextual bandit problem with the possibility of hidden simple multi-armed bandit structure in which the rewards are independent of the contextual information. Algorithms that are designed…
High-quality data plays a central role in ensuring the accuracy of policy evaluation. This paper initiates the study of efficient and safe data collection for bandit policy evaluation. We formulate the problem and investigate its several…
We address policy learning with logged data in contextual bandits. Current offline-policy learning algorithms are mostly based on inverse propensity score (IPS) weighting requiring the logging policy to have \emph{full support} i.e. a…
Contextual bandits are a form of multi-armed bandit in which the agent has access to predictive side information (known as the context) for each arm at each time step, and have been used to model personalized news recommendation, ad…
We propose a network architecture capable of reliably estimating uncertainty of regression based predictions without sacrificing accuracy. The current state-of-the-art uncertainty algorithms either fall short of achieving prediction…