Related papers: On Differentially Private Federated Linear Context…
Interference, a key concept in causal inference, extends the reward modeling process by accounting for the impact of one unit's actions on the rewards of others. In contextual bandit (CB) settings, where multiple units are present in the…
The performance of large language models (LLMs) is highly sensitive to the input prompt, making prompt optimization a critical task. However, real-world application is hindered by three major challenges: (1) the black-box nature of powerful…
We study the problem of privacy-preserving $k$-means clustering in the horizontally federated setting. Existing federated approaches using secure computation suffer from substantial overheads and do not offer output privacy. At the same…
Contextual bandits (CB) are online sequential decision-making problems under partial feedback that underpin many adaptive services. There is a growing demand to deploy CB agents directly on-device, under strict constraints on memory,…
In many fields such as digital marketing, healthcare, finance, and robotics, it is common to have a well-tested and reliable baseline policy running in production (e.g., a recommender system). Nonetheless, the baseline policy is often…
In this paper, we study kernelized bandits with distributed biased feedback. This problem is motivated by several real-world applications (such as dynamic pricing, cellular network configuration, and policy making), where users from a large…
We design differentially private algorithms for the problem of online linear optimization in the full information and bandit settings with optimal $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret bounds. In the full-information setting, our results demonstrate…
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…
We study the generalized linear contextual bandit problem within the constraints of limited adaptivity. In this paper, we present two algorithms, $\texttt{B-GLinCB}$ and $\texttt{RS-GLinCB}$, that address, respectively, two prevalent…
We study the linear contextual bandit problem with finite action sets. When the problem dimension is $d$, the time horizon is $T$, and there are $n \leq 2^{d/2}$ candidate actions per time period, we (1) show that the minimax expected…
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…
Federated Learning (FL) is a paradigm for large-scale distributed learning which faces two key challenges: (i) efficient training from highly heterogeneous user data, and (ii) protecting the privacy of participating users. In this work, 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…
We study a nonparametric contextual bandit problem where the expected reward functions belong to a H\"older class with smoothness parameter $\beta$. We show how this interpolates between two extremes that were previously studied in…
Large language models (LLMs) are typically governed by post-training alignment (e.g., RLHF or DPO), which yields a largely static policy during deployment and inference. However, real-world safety is a full-lifecycle problem: static…
This paper proposes a linear bandit algorithm that is adaptive to environments at two different levels of hierarchy. At the higher level, the proposed algorithm adapts to a variety of types of environments. More precisely, it achieves…
We study contextual bandits with nonlinear and path-dependent rewards through a novel signature-transform-based approach. Leveraging the universal nonlinearity property of signatures, we approximate continuous path-dependent reward…
Despite the significant interests and many progresses in decentralized multi-player multi-armed bandits (MP-MAB) problems in recent years, the regret gap to the natural centralized lower bound in the heterogeneous MP-MAB setting remains…
We study contextual linear bandit problems under feature uncertainty, where the features are noisy and have missing entries. To address the challenges posed by this noise, we analyze Bayesian oracles given the observed noisy features. Our…
This paper proposes a locally differentially private federated learning algorithm for strongly convex but possibly nonsmooth problems that protects the gradients of each worker against an honest but curious server. The proposed algorithm…