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Related papers: Practical Contextual Bandits with Feedback Graphs

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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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-06 Samuel Girard , Aurelien Bibaut , Arthur Gretton , Nathan Kallus , Houssam Zenati

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

In this paper, the causal bandit problem is investigated, with the objective of maximizing the long-term reward by selecting an optimal sequence of interventions on nodes in an unknown causal graph. It is assumed that both the causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Chen Peng , Di Zhang , Urbashi Mitra

In this paper we adapt the nearest neighbour rule to the contextual bandit problem. Our algorithm handles the fully adversarial setting in which no assumptions at all are made about the data-generation process. When combined with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-11 Stephen Pasteris , Chris Hicks , Vasilios Mavroudis

Contextual multinomial logit (MNL) bandits capture many real-world assortment recommendation problems such as online retailing/advertising. However, prior work has only considered (generalized) linear value functions, which greatly limits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Mengxiao Zhang , Haipeng Luo

In this work, we describe practical lessons we have learned from successfully using contextual bandits (CBs) to improve key business metrics of the Microsoft Virtual Agent for customer support. While our current use cases focus on single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-19 Nikos Karampatziakis , Sebastian Kochman , Jade Huang , Paul Mineiro , Kathy Osborne , Weizhu Chen

Data that is gathered adaptively --- via bandit algorithms, for example --- exhibits bias. This is true both when gathering simple numeric valued data --- the empirical means kept track of by stochastic bandit algorithms are biased…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-07 Seth Neel , Aaron Roth

We study here the problem of learning the exploration exploitation trade-off in the contextual bandit problem with linear reward function setting. In the traditional algorithms that solve the contextual bandit problem, the exploration is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-06 Djallel Bouneffouf , Emmanuelle Claeys

Contextual bandits have become an increasingly popular solution for personalized recommender systems. Despite their growing use, the interpretability of these systems remains a significant challenge, particularly for the often non-expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Andrew Maher , Matia Gobbo , Lancelot Lachartre , Subash Prabanantham , Rowan Swiers , Puli Liyanagama

This paper studies semiparametric contextual bandits, a generalization of the linear stochastic bandit problem where the reward for an action is modeled as a linear function of known action features confounded by an non-linear…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-17 Akshay Krishnamurthy , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Vasilis Syrgkanis

We introduce the cram method as a general statistical framework for evaluating the final learned policy from a multi-armed contextual bandit algorithm, using the dataset generated by the same bandit algorithm. The proposed on-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Zeyang Jia , Kosuke Imai , Michael Lingzhi Li

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

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

Contextual bandit algorithms have become popular for online recommendation systems such as Digg, Yahoo! Buzz, and news recommendation in general. \emph{Offline} evaluation of the effectiveness of new algorithms in these applications is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-13 Lihong Li , Wei Chu , John Langford , Xuanhui Wang

We investigate contextual bandits in the presence of side-observations across arms in order to design recommendation algorithms for users connected via social networks. Users in social networks respond to their friends' activity, and hence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Rahul Singh , Fang Liu , Xin Liu , Ness Shroff

Learning from human feedback plays an important role in aligning generative models, such as large language models (LLM). However, the effectiveness of this approach can be influenced by adversaries, who may intentionally provide misleading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Qiwei Di , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

Learning in multi-player games can model a large variety of practical scenarios, where each player seeks to optimize its own local objective function, which at the same time relies on the actions taken by others. Motivated by the frequent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-08 Yuanhanqing Huang , Jianghai Hu

In this paper we initiate a study of non parametric contextual bandits under shape constraints on the mean reward function. Specifically, we study a setting where the context is one dimensional, and the mean reward function is isotonic with…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-10-22 Sabyasachi Chatterjee , Subhabrata Sen

In performative prediction, the deployment of a predictive model triggers a shift in the data distribution. As these shifts are typically unknown ahead of time, the learner needs to deploy a model to get feedback about the distribution it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Meena Jagadeesan , Tijana Zrnic , Celestine Mendler-Dünner

In this work we revisit two classic high-dimensional online learning problems, namely linear regression and contextual bandits, from the perspective of adversarial robustness. Existing works in algorithmic robust statistics make strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-14 Sitan Chen , Frederic Koehler , Ankur Moitra , Morris Yau