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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

What is the most statistically efficient way to do off-policy evaluation and optimization with batch data from bandit feedback? For log data generated by contextual bandit algorithms, we consider offline estimators for the expected reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-07 Yusuke Narita , Shota Yasui , Kohei Yata

To investigate a dilemma of statistical and computational efficiency faced by long-run variance estimators, we propose a decomposition of kernel weights in a quadratic form and some online inference principles. These proposals allow us to…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-10 Man Fung Leung , Kin Wai Chan

Adaptively collected data has become ubiquitous within modern practice. However, even seemingly benign adaptive sampling schemes can introduce severe biases, rendering traditional statistical inference tools inapplicable. This can be…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-12-02 Wei Fan , Kevin Tan , Yuting Wei

Bandit structured prediction describes a stochastic optimization framework where learning is performed from partial feedback. This feedback is received in the form of a task loss evaluation to a predicted output structure, without having…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-14 Julia Kreutzer , Artem Sokolov , Stefan Riezler

We study the problem of online learning in contextual bandit problems where the loss function is assumed to belong to a known parametric function class. We propose a new analytic framework for this setting that bridges the Bayesian theory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-28 Gergely Neu , Matteo Papini , Ludovic Schwartz

In real-world streaming recommender systems, user preferences often dynamically change over time (e.g., a user may have different preferences during weekdays and weekends). Existing bandit-based streaming recommendation models only consider…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-08-17 Chenglei Shen , Xiao Zhang , Wei Wei , Jun Xu

In this paper, we investigate the theoretical properties of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for statistical inference in the context of nonconvex optimization problems, which have been relatively unexplored compared to convex settings.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-06 Yanjie Zhong , Todd Kuffner , Soumendra Lahiri

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

Leveraging offline data is an attractive way to accelerate online sequential decision-making. However, it is crucial to account for latent states in users or environments in the offline data, and latent bandits form a compelling model for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Chinmaya Kausik , Kevin Tan , Ambuj Tewari

We propose a novel framework for structured bandits, which we call an influence diagram bandit. Our framework captures complex statistical dependencies between actions, latent variables, and observations; and thus unifies and extends many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-10 Tong Yu , Branislav Kveton , Zheng Wen , Ruiyi Zhang , Ole J. Mengshoel

Contextual dueling bandit is used to model the bandit problems, where a learner's goal is to find the best arm for a given context using observed noisy human preference feedback over the selected arms for the past contexts. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Arun Verma , Zhongxiang Dai , Xiaoqiang Lin , Patrick Jaillet , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

Contextual sequential decision-making problems play a crucial role in machine learning, encompassing a wide range of downstream applications such as bandits, sequential hypothesis testing and online risk control. These applications often…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-31 Haichen Hu , Rui Ai , Stephen Bates , David Simchi-Levi

Most contextual bandit algorithms minimize regret against the best fixed policy, a questionable benchmark for non-stationary environments that are ubiquitous in applications. In this work, we develop several efficient contextual bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-05 Haipeng Luo , Chen-Yu Wei , Alekh Agarwal , John Langford

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-05-27 Hongju Park , Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh

We consider the stochastic contextual bandit problem under the high dimensional linear model. We focus on the case where the action space is finite and random, with each action associated with a randomly generated contextual covariate. This…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-07 Yining Wang , Yi Chen , Ethan X. Fang , Zhaoran Wang , Runze Li

We consider the problem of contextual bandits and imitation learning, where the learner lacks direct knowledge of the executed action's reward. Instead, the learner can actively query an expert at each round to compare two actions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan , Wen Sun , Runzhe Wu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-20 Lihong Li , Yu Lu , Dengyong Zhou

Selecting a sample generation scheme from multiple prompt-based generative models, including large language models (LLMs) and prompt-guided image and video generation models, is typically addressed by choosing the model that maximizes an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Xiaoyan Hu , Ho-fung Leung , Farzan Farnia

We study the problem of using causal models to improve the rate at which good interventions can be learned online in a stochastic environment. Our formalism combines multi-arm bandits and causal inference to model a novel type of bandit…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-13 Finnian Lattimore , Tor Lattimore , Mark D. Reid