Related papers: A Contextual Bandit Approach for Value-oriented Pr…
A central problem in sequential decision making is to develop algorithms that are practical and computationally efficient, yet support the use of flexible, general-purpose models. Focusing on the contextual bandit problem, recent progress…
Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits is crucial for assessing new policies using existing data without costly experimentation. However, current OPE methods, such as Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) and Doubly Robust (DR)…
Contextual bandit algorithms -- a class of multi-armed bandit algorithms that exploit the contextual information -- have been shown to be effective in solving sequential decision making problems under uncertainty. A common assumption…
The rise of large-scale pretrained models has made it feasible to generate predictive or synthetic features at low cost, raising the question of how to incorporate such surrogate predictions into downstream decision-making. We study this…
Incorporating side observations in decision making can reduce uncertainty and boost performance, but it also requires we tackle a potentially complex predictive relationship. While one may use off-the-shelf machine learning methods to…
Providing health monitoring devices with machine intelligence is important for enabling automatic mobile healthcare applications. However, this brings additional challenges due to the resource scarcity of these devices. This work introduces…
The paper introduces a new methodology for assessing on-line the prediction risk of short-term wind power forecasts. The first part of this methodology consists in computing confidence intervals with a confidence level defined by the…
Contextual bandits are canonical models for sequential decision-making under uncertainty in environments with time-varying components. In this setting, the expected reward of each bandit arm consists of the inner product of an unknown…
Over the past decade, contextual bandit algorithms have been gaining in popularity due to their effectiveness and flexibility in solving sequential decision problems---from online advertising and finance to clinical trial design and…
Wind power is playing an increasingly important role in electricity markets. However, it's inherent variability and uncertainty cause operational challenges and costs as more operating reserves are needed to maintain system reliability.…
In networked environments, users frequently share recommendations about content, products, services, and courses of action with others. The extent to which such recommendations are successful and adopted is highly contextual, dependent on…
The explosion in mobile data traffic together with the ever-increasing expectations for higher quality of service call for the development of AI algorithms for wireless network optimization. In this paper, we investigate how to learn…
Bandits with covariates, a.k.a. contextual bandits, address situations where optimal actions (or arms) at a given time $t$, depend on a context $x_t$, e.g., a new patient's medical history, a consumer's past purchases. While it is…
While contextual bandit has a mature theory, effectively leveraging different feedback patterns to enhance the pace of learning remains unclear. Bandits with feedback graphs, which interpolates between the full information and bandit…
We study risk-aware offline policy learning, aiming to learn a decision rule from logged data that is optimal under general risk criteria. This problem is crucial in high-stakes domains where online interaction is infeasible and adverse…
Given a large pool of unlabelled data and a smaller amount of labels, prediction-powered inference (PPI) leverages machine learning predictions to increase the statistical efficiency of confidence interval procedures based solely on…
Equitably allocating limited resources in high-stakes domains-such as education, employment, and healthcare-requires balancing short-term utility with long-term impact, while accounting for delayed outcomes, hidden heterogeneity, and…
Contextual linear optimization (CLO) uses predictive contextual features to reduce uncertainty in random cost coefficients in the objective and thereby improve decision-making performance. A canonical example is the stochastic shortest path…
A major challenge in contextual bandits is to design general-purpose algorithms that are both practically useful and theoretically well-founded. We present a new technique that has the empirical and computational advantages of…
Forecasting is an indispensable element of operational research (OR) and an important aid to planning. The accurate estimation of the forecast uncertainty facilitates several operations management activities, predominantly in supporting…