Related papers: Oracle-Efficient Pessimism: Offline Policy Optimiz…
We propose an estimator and confidence interval for computing the value of a policy from off-policy data in the contextual bandit setting. To this end we apply empirical likelihood techniques to formulate our estimator and confidence…
We study Online Convex Optimization (OCO) with adversarial constraints, where an online algorithm must make sequential decisions to minimize both convex loss functions and cumulative constraint violations. We focus on a setting where the…
Off-policy learning (OPL) often involves minimizing a risk estimator based on importance weighting to correct bias from the logging policy used to collect data. However, this method can produce an estimator with a high variance. A common…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a challenging setting where existing off-policy actor-critic methods perform poorly due to the overestimation of out-of-distribution state-action pairs. Thus, various additional augmentations are…
We consider off-policy selection and learning in contextual bandits, where the learner aims to select or train a reward-maximizing policy using data collected by a fixed behavior policy. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we propose a…
Motivated by online recommendation systems, we propose the problem of finding the optimal policy in multitask contextual bandits when a small fraction $\alpha < 1/2$ of tasks (users) are arbitrary and adversarial. The remaining fraction of…
Combinatorial multi-armed bandits provide a fundamental online decision-making environment where a decision-maker interacts with an environment across $T$ time steps, each time selecting an action and learning the cost of that action. The…
A central problem in sequential decision making is to develop algorithms that are practical and computationally efficient, yet support the use of flexible, general-purpose models. Focusing on the contextual bandit problem, recent progress…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn decision policies from a fixed batch of logged transitions, without additional environment interaction. Despite remarkable empirical progress, offline RL remains fragile under distribution…
Dynamic treatment regimes (DTRs) provide a principled framework for optimizing sequential decision-making in domains where decisions must adapt over time in response to individual trajectories, such as healthcare, education, and digital…
Many practical applications, such as recommender systems and learning to rank, involve solving multiple similar tasks. One example is learning of recommendation policies for users with similar movie preferences, where the users may still…
A major research direction in contextual bandits is to develop algorithms that are computationally efficient, yet support flexible, general-purpose function approximation. Algorithms based on modeling rewards have shown strong empirical…
We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL), a crucial field due to its ability to enhance decision-making in scenarios where it is essential to manage uncertainty and minimize potential adverse outcomes. Particularly, our work…
Contextual bandit algorithms are ubiquitous tools for active sequential experimentation in healthcare and the tech industry. They involve online learning algorithms that adaptively learn policies over time to map observed contexts $X_t$ to…
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…
We consider the offline reinforcement learning (RL) setting where the agent aims to optimize the policy solely from the data without further environment interactions. In offline RL, the distributional shift becomes the primary source of…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) attempts to predict the performance of counterfactual policies using log data from a different policy. We extend its applicability by developing an OPE method for a class of both full support and deficient…
We present an oracle-efficient relaxation for the adversarial contextual bandits problem, where the contexts are sequentially drawn i.i.d from a known distribution and the cost sequence is chosen by an online adversary. Our algorithm has a…
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…
We give an oracle-based algorithm for the adversarial contextual bandit problem, where either contexts are drawn i.i.d. or the sequence of contexts is known a priori, but where the losses are picked adversarially. Our algorithm is…