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Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) have shown that KL-regularization plays a pivotal role in improving the efficiency of RL fine-tuning for large language models (LLMs). Despite its empirical advantage, the…
We present a new algorithm for the contextual bandit learning problem, where the learner repeatedly takes one of $K$ actions in response to the observed context, and observes the reward only for that chosen action. Our method assumes access…
This study presents two new algorithms for solving linear stochastic bandit problems. The proposed methods use an approach from non-parametric statistics called bootstrapping to create confidence bounds. This is achieved without making any…
Safety is a desirable property that can immensely increase the applicability of learning algorithms in real-world decision-making problems. It is much easier for a company to deploy an algorithm that is safe, i.e., guaranteed to perform at…
We consider the contextual bandit problem on general action and context spaces, where the learner's rewards depend on their selected actions and an observable context. This generalizes the standard multi-armed bandit to the case where side…
We study a variant of the stochastic linear bandit problem wherein we optimize a linear objective function but rewards are accrued only orthogonal to an unknown subspace (which we interpret as a \textit{protected space}) given only…
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 introduce the problem of model selection for contextual bandits, where a learner must adapt to the complexity of the optimal policy while balancing exploration and exploitation. Our main result is a new model selection guarantee for…
In many fields such as digital marketing, healthcare, finance, and robotics, it is common to have a well-tested and reliable baseline policy running in production (e.g., a recommender system). Nonetheless, the baseline policy is often…
We study the multinomial logit (MNL) contextual bandit problem for sequential assortment selection. Although most existing research assumes utility functions to be linear in item features, this linearity assumption restricts the modeling of…
Contextual bandits provide an effective way to model the dynamic data problem in ML by leveraging online (incremental) learning to continuously adjust the predictions based on changing environment. We explore details on contextual bandits,…
We study the contextual linear bandit problem, a version of the standard stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem where a learner sequentially selects actions to maximize a reward which depends also on a user provided per-round context.…
We study contextual bandits with budget and time constraints, referred to as constrained contextual bandits.The time and budget constraints significantly complicate the exploration and exploitation tradeoff because they introduce complex…
Recent works in bandit problems adopted lasso convergence theory in the sequential decision-making setting. Even with fully observed contexts, there are technical challenges that hinder the application of existing lasso convergence theory:…
In the stochastic bandit problem, the goal is to maximize an unknown function via a sequence of noisy evaluations. Typically, the observation noise is assumed to be independent of the evaluation point and to satisfy a tail bound uniformly…
We consider a sequential assortment selection problem where the user choice is given by a multinomial logit (MNL) choice model whose parameters are unknown. In each period, the learning agent observes a $d$-dimensional contextual…
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…
We consider the problem of stochastic $K$-armed dueling bandit in the contextual setting, where at each round the learner is presented with a context set of $K$ items, each represented by a $d$-dimensional feature vector, and the goal of…
We investigate the problem of unconstrained combinatorial multi-armed bandits with full-bandit feedback and stochastic rewards for submodular maximization. Previous works investigate the same problem assuming a submodular and monotone…
In this paper, we address the stochastic contextual linear bandit problem, where a decision maker is provided a context (a random set of actions drawn from a distribution). The expected reward of each action is specified by the inner…