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We consider a contextual bandit problem with a combinatorial action set and time-varying base arm availability. At the beginning of each round, the agent observes the set of available base arms and their contexts and then selects an action…

Contextual bandits with linear payoffs, which are also known as linear bandits, provide a powerful alternative for solving practical problems of sequential decisions, e.g., online advertisements. In the era of big data, contextual data…

We consider the neural contextual bandit problem. In contrast to the existing work which primarily focuses on ReLU neural nets, we consider a general set of smooth activation functions. Under this more general setting, (i) we derive…

Current medical practice depends on standardized treatment frameworks and empirical methodologies that neglect individual patient variations, leading to suboptimal health outcomes. We develop a comprehensive system integrating Large…

Interactive recommender systems that enable the interactions between users and the recommender system have attracted increasing research attentions. Previous methods mainly focus on optimizing recommendation accuracy. However, they usually…

Thanks to the power of representation learning, neural contextual bandit algorithms demonstrate remarkable performance improvement against their classical counterparts. But because their exploration has to be performed in the entire neural…

This paper presents a concise review of Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit (CMAB) methods and introduces an experimental framework for scalable, interpretable offer selection, addressing the challenge of fast-changing offers. The approach models…

Recommender systems trained in a continuous learning fashion are plagued by the feedback loop problem, also known as algorithmic bias. This causes a newly trained model to act greedily and favor items that have already been engaged by…

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…

We propose a contextual bandit based model to capture the learning and social welfare goals of a web platform in the presence of myopic users. By using payments to incentivize these agents to explore different items/recommendations, we show…

Contextual multi-armed bandit is a fundamental learning framework for making a sequence of decisions, e.g., advertising recommendations for a sequence of arriving users. Recent works have shown that clustering these users based on the…

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…

Multi-armed bandit algorithms have become a reference solution for handling the explore/exploit dilemma in recommender systems, and many other important real-world problems, such as display advertisement. However, such algorithms usually…

This paper introduces a novel multi-armed bandits framework, termed Contextual Restless Bandits (CRB), for complex online decision-making. This CRB framework incorporates the core features of contextual bandits and restless bandits, so that…

Contextual bandits algorithms aim to choose the optimal arm with the highest reward out of a set of candidates based on the contextual information. Various bandit algorithms have been applied to real-world applications due to their ability…

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…

We study contextual bandit (CB) problems, where the user can sometimes respond with the best action in a given context. Such an interaction arises, for example, in text prediction or autocompletion settings, where a poor suggestion is…

Most existing works on federated bandits take it for granted that all clients are altruistic about sharing their data with the server for the collective good whenever needed. Despite their compelling theoretical guarantee on performance and…

Recent works on Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) and Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandits (COM-MAB) show good results on a global accuracy metric. This can be achieved, in the case of recommender systems, with personalization. However, with a…

This paper considers contextual bandits with a finite number of arms, where the contexts are independent and identically distributed $d$-dimensional random vectors, and the expected rewards are linear in both the arm parameters and…