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Contextual bandit algorithms provide principled online learning solutions to balance the exploitation-exploration trade-off in various applications such as recommender systems. However, the learning speed of the traditional contextual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-28 Xiaoying Zhang , Hong Xie , Hang Li , John C. S. Lui

We study sequential decision making in environments where rewards are only partially observed, but can be modeled as a function of observed contexts and the chosen action by the decision maker. This setting, known as contextual bandits,…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-03-11 Miroslav Dudík , Dumitru Erhan , John Langford , Lihong Li

Large-scale, two-sided matching platforms must find market outcomes that align with user preferences while simultaneously learning these preferences from data. Classical notions of stability (Gale and Shapley, 1962; Shapley and Shubik,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-02 Meena Jagadeesan , Alexander Wei , Yixin Wang , Michael I. Jordan , Jacob Steinhardt

The statistical framework of Generalized Linear Models (GLM) can be applied to sequential problems involving categorical or ordinal rewards associated, for instance, with clicks, likes or ratings. In the example of binary rewards, logistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-24 Yoan Russac , Olivier Cappé , Aurélien Garivier

In this paper we propose a novel framework for decentralized, online learning by many learners. At each moment of time, an instance characterized by a certain context may arrive to each learner; based on the context, the learner can select…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-24 Cem Tekin , Mihaela van der Schaar

In a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, an online algorithm makes a sequence of choices. In each round it chooses from a time-invariant set of alternatives and receives the payoff associated with this alternative. While the case of small…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2014-05-21 Aleksandrs Slivkins

Contextual bandits have emerged as a cornerstone in reinforcement learning, enabling systems to make decisions with partial feedback. However, as contexts grow in complexity, traditional bandit algorithms can face challenges in adequately…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Ali Baheri , Cecilia O. Alm

Standard approaches to decision-making under uncertainty focus on sequential exploration of the space of decisions. However, \textit{simultaneously} proposing a batch of decisions, which leverages available resources for parallel…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-07 Jeffrey Chan , Aldo Pacchiano , Nilesh Tripuraneni , Yun S. Song , Peter Bartlett , Michael I. Jordan

Motivated by applications in online bidding and sleeping bandits, we examine the problem of contextual bandits with cross learning, where the learner observes the loss associated with the action across all possible contexts, not just the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Ruiyuan Huang , Zengfeng Huang

We study the Inverse Contextual Bandit (ICB) problem, in which a learner seeks to optimize a policy while an observer, who cannot access the learner's rewards and only observes actions, aims to recover the underlying problem parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Yuqi Kong , Xiao Zhang , Weiran Shen

We study the problem of online learning in adversarial bandit problems under a partial observability model called off-policy feedback. In this sequential decision making problem, the learner cannot directly observe its rewards, but instead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-20 Germano Gabbianelli , Matteo Papini , Gergely Neu

In high-stakes AI applications, even a single action can cause irreparable damage. However, nearly all of sequential decision-making theory assumes that all errors are recoverable (e.g., by bounding rewards). Standard bandit algorithms that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Sarah Liaw , Benjamin Plaut

We consider the problem of contextual bandits where actions are subsets of a ground set and mean rewards are modeled by an unknown monotone submodular function that belongs to a class $\mathcal{F}$. We allow time-varying matroid constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Dean P. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin

We provide the first oracle efficient sublinear regret algorithms for adversarial versions of the contextual bandit problem. In this problem, the learner repeatedly makes an action on the basis of a context and receives reward for the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-02-09 Vasilis Syrgkanis , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Robert E. Schapire

A major challenge in contextual bandits is to design general-purpose algorithms that are both practically useful and theoretically well-founded. We present a new technique that has the empirical and computational advantages of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-06 Dylan J. Foster , Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudík , Haipeng Luo , Robert E. Schapire

Collaborative bandit learning, i.e., bandit algorithms that utilize collaborative filtering techniques to improve sample efficiency in online interactive recommendation, has attracted much research attention as it enjoys the best of both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-16 Chuanhao Li , Qingyun Wu , Hongning Wang

We consider the problem of learning to choose actions using contextual information when provided with limited feedback in the form of relative pairwise comparisons. We study this problem in the dueling-bandits framework of Yue et al.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-06-16 Miroslav Dudík , Katja Hofmann , Robert E. Schapire , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Masrour Zoghi

In many sequential decision-making problems, the individuals are split into several batches and the decision-maker is only allowed to change her policy at the end of batches. These batch problems have a large number of applications, ranging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Quanquan Gu , Amin Karbasi , Khashayar Khosravi , Vahab Mirrokni , Dongruo Zhou

Contextual bandits are online learners that, given an input, select an arm and receive a reward for that arm. They use the reward as a learning signal and aim to maximize the total reward over the inputs. Contextual bandits are commonly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-14 Awni Hannun , Brian Knott , Shubho Sengupta , Laurens van der Maaten