Related papers: A Contextual Bandit Approach for Value-oriented Pr…

We propose an efficient Context-Aware clustering of Bandits (CAB) algorithm, which can capture collaborative effects. CAB can be easily deployed in a real-world recommendation system, where multi-armed bandits have been shown to perform…

In many bandit problems, the maximal reward achievable by a policy is often unknown in advance. We consider the problem of estimating the optimal policy value in the sublinear data regime before the optimal policy is even learnable. We…

In computational science workflows, it is often the case that 1) objective functions for optimization involve multiple simulation outputs, and 2) those simulations can be performed (at least partially) in parallel. In this work, we…

Many efficient algorithms with strong theoretical guarantees have been proposed for the contextual multi-armed bandit problem. However, applying these algorithms in practice can be difficult because they require domain expertise to build…

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…

Real-world applications of contextual bandits often exhibit non-stationarity due to seasonality, serendipity, and evolving social trends. While a number of non-stationary contextual bandit learning algorithms have been proposed in the…

The present paper deals with online convex optimization involving both time-varying loss functions, and time-varying constraints. The loss functions are not fully accessible to the learner, and instead only the function values (a.k.a.…

We present PPI++: a computationally lightweight methodology for estimation and inference based on a small labeled dataset and a typically much larger dataset of machine-learning predictions. The methods automatically adapt to the quality of…

Contextual bandit learning is an increasingly popular approach to optimizing recommender systems via user feedback, but can be slow to converge in practice due to the need for exploring a large feature space. In this paper, we propose a…

We consider a set of APs with unknown data rates that cooperatively serve a mobile client. The data rate of each link is i.i.d. sampled from a distribution that is unknown a priori. In contrast to traditional link scheduling problems under…

Optimal resource allocation in modern communication networks calls for the optimization of objective functions that are only accessible via costly separate evaluations for each candidate solution. The conventional approach carries out the…

Building multi-domain AI agents is a challenging task and an open problem in the area of AI. Within the domain of dialog, the ability to orchestrate multiple independently trained dialog agents, or skills, to create a unified system is of…

Achieving the full promise of the Thermodynamic Variational Objective (TVO), a recently proposed variational lower bound on the log evidence involving a one-dimensional Riemann integral approximation, requires choosing a "schedule" of…

Object-goal navigation (Object-nav) entails searching, recognizing and navigating to a target object. Object-nav has been extensively studied by the Embodied-AI community, but most solutions are often restricted to considering static…

Every prediction is ultimately used in a downstream task. Consequently, evaluating prediction quality is more meaningful when considered in the context of its downstream use. Metrics based solely on predictive performance often diverge from…

The stochastic contextual bandit problem, which models the trade-off between exploration and exploitation, has many real applications, including recommender systems, online advertising and clinical trials. As many other machine learning…

We present efficient algorithms for the problem of contextual bandits with i.i.d. covariates, an arbitrary sequence of rewards, and an arbitrary class of policies. Our algorithm BISTRO requires d calls to the empirical risk minimization…

We study contextual bandits in the presence of a stage-wise constraint when the constraint must be satisfied both with high probability and in expectation. We start with the linear case where both the reward function and the stage-wise…

We study the off-policy evaluation problem---estimating the value of a target policy using data collected by another policy---under the contextual bandit model. We consider the general (agnostic) setting without access to a consistent model…

This paper extends the Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) approach for offline contextual bandits. Specifically, we leverage this framework to introduce a convex reformulation of the Counterfactual Risk Minimization principle.…