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We study a general class of contextual bandits, where each context-action pair is associated with a raw feature vector, but the reward generating function is unknown. We propose a novel learning algorithm that transforms the raw feature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Pan Xu , Zheng Wen , Handong Zhao , Quanquan Gu

Contextual bandits are a central framework for sequential decision-making, with applications ranging from recommendation systems to clinical trials. While nonparametric methods can flexibly model complex reward structures, they suffer from…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-01 Wanteng Ma , T. Tony Cai

We consider realizable contextual bandits with general function approximation, investigating how small reward variance can lead to better-than-minimax regret bounds. Unlike in minimax bounds, we show that the eluder dimension…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Zeyu Jia , Jian Qian , Alexander Rakhlin , Chen-Yu Wei

We study contextual bandits with low-rank structure where, in each round, if the (context, arm) pair $(i,j)\in [m]\times [n]$ is selected, the learner observes a noisy sample of the $(i,j)$-th entry of an unknown low-rank reward matrix.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Yassir Jedra , William Réveillard , Stefan Stojanovic , Alexandre Proutiere

This study investigates the problem of $K$-armed linear contextual bandits, an instance of the multi-armed bandit problem, under an adversarial corruption. At each round, a decision-maker observes an independent and identically distributed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-29 Masahiro Kato , Shinji Ito

In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Ruohan Zhan , Susan Athey , Emma Brunskill

In the contextual pricing problem a seller repeatedly obtains products described by an adversarially chosen feature vector in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and only observes the purchasing decisions of a buyer with a fixed but unknown linear valuation…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-02-25 Allen Liu , Renato Paes Leme , Jon Schneider

We study online learning with bandit feedback (i.e. learner has access to only zeroth-order oracle) where cost/reward functions $\f_t$ admit a "pseudo-1d" structure, i.e. $\f_t(\w) = \loss_t(\pred_t(\w))$ where the output of $\pred_t$ is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Aadirupa Saha , Nagarajan Natarajan , Praneeth Netrapalli , Prateek Jain

We develop a model selection approach to tackle reinforcement learning with adversarial corruption in both transition and reward. For finite-horizon tabular MDPs, without prior knowledge on the total amount of corruption, our algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Chen-Yu Wei , Christoph Dann , Julian Zimmert

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 study the problem of neural logistic bandits, where the main task is to learn an unknown reward function within a logistic link function using a neural network. Existing approaches either exhibit unfavorable dependencies on $\kappa$,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Seoungbin Bae , Dabeen Lee

We present a new algorithm for the contextual bandit learning problem, where the learner repeatedly takes one of $K$ actions in response to the observed context, and observes the reward only for that chosen action. Our method assumes access…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-10-15 Alekh Agarwal , Daniel Hsu , Satyen Kale , John Langford , Lihong Li , Robert E. Schapire

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

We revisit the study of optimal regret rates in bandit combinatorial optimization---a fundamental framework for sequential decision making under uncertainty that abstracts numerous combinatorial prediction problems. We prove that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-27 Alon Cohen , Tamir Hazan , Tomer Koren

We consider the general (stochastic) contextual bandit problem under the realizability assumption, i.e., the expected reward, as a function of contexts and actions, belongs to a general function class $\mathcal{F}$. We design a fast and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 David Simchi-Levi , Yunzong Xu

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 how representation learning can improve the learning efficiency of contextual bandit problems. We study the setting where we play T contextual linear bandits with dimension d simultaneously, and these T bandit tasks collectively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-08 Jiabin Lin , Shana Moothedath , Namrata Vaswani

Bandit algorithms sequentially accumulate data using adaptive sampling policies, offering flexibility for real-world applications. However, excessive sampling can be costly, motivating the devolopment of early stopping methods and reliable…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-02-06 Zihan Cui

We study contextual bandit learning with an abstract policy class and continuous action space. We obtain two qualitatively different regret bounds: one competes with a smoothed version of the policy class under no continuity assumptions,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-23 Akshay Krishnamurthy , John Langford , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Chicheng Zhang

Contextual bandits are a form of multi-armed bandit in which the agent has access to predictive side information (known as the context) for each arm at each time step, and have been used to model personalized news recommendation, ad…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-05-25 Aniket Anand Deshmukh , Urun Dogan , Clayton Scott