Related papers: Conditionally Risk-Averse Contextual Bandits
We study nonparametric contextual bandits under batch constraints, where the expected reward for each action is modeled as a smooth function of covariates, and the policy updates are made at the end of each batch of observations. We…
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…
Contextual bandit algorithms are at the core of many applications, including recommender systems, clinical trials, and optimal portfolio selection. One of the most popular problems studied in the contextual bandit literature is to maximize…
Stochastic linear contextual bandit algorithms have substantial applications in practice, such as recommender systems, online advertising, clinical trials, etc. Recent works show that optimal bandit algorithms are vulnerable to adversarial…
Contextual bandits are widely used in Internet services from news recommendation to advertising, and to Web search. Generalized linear models (logistical regression in particular) have demonstrated stronger performance than linear models in…
Contextual bandits serve as a fundamental model for many sequential decision making tasks. The most popular theoretically justified approaches are based on the optimism principle. While these algorithms can be practical, they are known to…
In this paper, we investigate the impact of context diversity on stochastic linear contextual bandits. As opposed to the previous view that contexts lead to more difficult bandit learning, we show that when the contexts are sufficiently…
A contextual bandit problem is studied in a highly non-stationary environment, which is ubiquitous in various recommender systems due to the time-varying interests of users. Two models with disjoint and hybrid payoffs are considered to…
Contextual bandits have the same exploration-exploitation trade-off as standard multi-armed bandits. On adding positive externalities that decay with time, this problem becomes much more difficult as wrong decisions at the start are hard to…
Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving real-world decision making problems. In practice, collecting a contextual bandit's feedback from different domains may involve different costs. For example, measuring drug reaction from…
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…
Contextual bandit algorithms are commonly used in digital health to recommend personalized treatments. However, to ensure the effectiveness of the treatments, patients are often requested to take actions that have no immediate benefit to…
Multi-armed bandit algorithms have become a reference solution for handling the explore/exploit dilemma in recommender systems, and many other important real-world problems, such as display advertisement. However, such algorithms usually…
Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…
Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits is a well-known and accepted online optimization algorithm, that is used in many Web experiences to tailor content or presentation to users' traffic. Much has been published on theoretical guarantees (e.g.…
We study the problem of stochastic contextual bandits in the agnostic setting, where the goal is to compete with the best policy in a given class without assuming realizability or imposing model restrictions on losses or rewards. In this…
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…
A fundamental challenge in contextual bandits is to develop flexible, general-purpose algorithms with computational requirements no worse than classical supervised learning tasks such as classification and regression. Algorithms based on…
For infinite action contextual bandits, smoothed regret and reduction to regression results in state-of-the-art online performance with computational cost independent of the action set: unfortunately, the resulting data exhaust does not…
We address the problem of learning in an online, bandit setting where the learner must repeatedly select among $K$ actions, but only receives partial feedback based on its choices. We establish two new facts: First, using a new algorithm…