English
Related papers

Related papers: Contexts can be Cheap: Solving Stochastic Contextu…

200 papers

We consider the kernelized contextual bandit problem with a large feature space. This problem involves $K$ arms, and the goal of the forecaster is to maximize the cumulative rewards through learning the relationship between the contexts and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-21 Shogo Iwazaki , Junpei Komiyama , Masaaki Imaizumi

We study contextual bandits with ancillary constraints on resources, which are common in real-world applications such as choosing ads or dynamic pricing of items. We design the first algorithm for solving these problems that handles…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-08-03 Ashwinkumar Badanidiyuru , John Langford , Aleksandrs Slivkins

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Aadirupa Saha , Aditya Gopalan

Model selection in supervised learning provides costless guarantees as if the model that best balances bias and variance was known a priori. We study the feasibility of similar guarantees for cumulative regret minimization in the stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Adrienne Margaret Propp , Susan Athey

In this work, we develop linear bandit algorithms that automatically adapt to different environments. By plugging a novel loss estimator into the optimization problem that characterizes the instance-optimal strategy, our first algorithm not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Chung-Wei Lee , Haipeng Luo , Chen-Yu Wei , Mengxiao Zhang , Xiaojin Zhang

In this paper, we consider a best action identification problem in the stochastic linear bandit setup with a fixed confident constraint. In the considered best action identification problem, instead of minimizing the accumulative regret as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-04 Jun Geng , Lifeng Lai

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-17 Botao Hao , Tor Lattimore , Csaba Szepesvari

Bandit learning is characterized by the tension between long-term exploration and short-term exploitation. However, as has recently been noted, in settings in which the choices of the learning algorithm correspond to important decisions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-11 Sampath Kannan , Jamie Morgenstern , Aaron Roth , Bo Waggoner , Zhiwei Steven Wu

To address the contextual bandit problem, we propose an online random forest algorithm. The analysis of the proposed algorithm is based on the sample complexity needed to find the optimal decision stump. Then, the decision stumps are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-09-16 Raphaël Féraud , Robin Allesiardo , Tanguy Urvoy , Fabrice Clérot

We study the problem of contextual combinatorial semi-bandits, where input contexts are mapped into subsets of size $m$ of a collection of $K$ possible actions. In each round, the learner observes the realized reward of the predicted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Liad Erez , Tomer Koren

Modern systems, such as digital platforms and service systems, increasingly rely on contextual bandits for online decision-making; however, their deployment can inadvertently create unfair exposure among arms, undermining long-term platform…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-05 Qingwen Zhang , Wenjia Wang

Nonparametric contextual bandit is an important model of sequential decision making problems. Under $\alpha$-Tsybakov margin condition, existing research has established a regret bound of $\tilde{O}\left(T^{1-\frac{\alpha+1}{d+2}}\right)$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Puning Zhao , Rongfei Fan , Shaowei Wang , Li Shen , Qixin Zhang , Zong Ke , Tianhang Zheng

A key goal in stochastic contextual linear bandits is to efficiently learn a near-optimal policy. Prior algorithms for this problem learn a policy by strategically sampling actions but naively (passively) sampling contexts from the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Emma Brunskill , Ishani Karmarkar , Zhaoqi Li

Contextual linear bandits is a rich and theoretically important model that has many practical applications. Recently, this setup gained a lot of interest in applications over wireless where communication constraints can be a performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-10 Osama A. Hanna , Lin F. Yang , Christina Fragouli

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-03 Moise Blanchard , Steve Hanneke , Patrick Jaillet

We study the problem of federated stochastic multi-arm contextual bandits with unknown contexts, in which M agents are faced with different bandits and collaborate to learn. The communication model consists of a central server and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Jiabin Lin , Shana Moothedath

One of the primary challenges in large-scale distributed learning stems from stringent communication constraints. While several recent works address this challenge for static optimization problems, sequential decision-making under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-03 Aritra Mitra , Hamed Hassani , George J. Pappas

Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-07 Branislav Kveton , Martin Mladenov , Chih-Wei Hsu , Manzil Zaheer , Csaba Szepesvari , Craig Boutilier

Motivated by online recommendation and advertising systems, we consider a causal model for stochastic contextual bandits with a latent low-dimensional confounder. In our model, there are $L$ observed contexts and $K$ arms of the bandit. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-28 Rajat Sen , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Murat Kocaoglu , Alexandros G. Dimakis , Sanjay Shakkottai

We propose the first contextual bandit algorithm that is parameter-free, efficient, and optimal in terms of dynamic regret. Specifically, our algorithm achieves dynamic regret $\mathcal{O}(\min\{\sqrt{ST},…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-19 Yifang Chen , Chung-Wei Lee , Haipeng Luo , Chen-Yu Wei