English
Related papers

Related papers: Kernelized Offline Contextual Dueling Bandits

200 papers

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-23 Priyank Agrawal , Theja Tulabandhula

We consider the well-studied dueling bandit problem, where a learner aims to identify near-optimal actions using pairwise comparisons, under the constraint of differential privacy. We consider a general class of utility-based preference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-25 Aadirupa Saha , Hilal Asi

We consider Bayesian optimization in settings where observations can be adversarially biased, for example by an uncontrolled hidden confounder. Our first contribution is a reduction of the confounded setting to the dueling bandit model.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-10 Johannes Kirschner , Andreas Krause

Contextual bandit algorithms are commonly used in digital health to recommend personalized treatments. However, to ensure the effectiveness of the treatments, patients are often requested to take actions that have no immediate benefit to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Kyra Gan , Esmaeil Keyvanshokooh , Xueqing Liu , Susan Murphy

We study budget-constrained contextual bandits with adversarial contexts, where each action yields a random reward and incurs a random cost. We adopt the standard realizability assumption: conditioned on the observed context, rewards and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Dhruv Sarkar , Abhishek Sinha

Bandits with preference feedback present a powerful tool for optimizing unknown target functions when only pairwise comparisons are allowed instead of direct value queries. This model allows for incorporating human feedback into online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Barna Pásztor , Parnian Kassraie , Andreas Krause

Contextual bandits have the same exploration-exploitation trade-off as standard multi-armed bandits. On adding positive externalities that decay with time, this problem becomes much more difficult as wrong decisions at the start are hard to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-15 Harsh Deshpande , Vishal Jain , Sharayu Moharir

We consider the problem of stochastic $K$-armed dueling bandit in the contextual setting, where at each round the learner is presented with a context set of $K$ items, each represented by a $d$-dimensional feature vector, and the goal of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Aadirupa Saha , Aditya Gopalan

In networked environments, users frequently share recommendations about content, products, services, and courses of action with others. The extent to which such recommendations are successful and adopted is highly contextual, dependent on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Ahmed Sayeed Faruk , Mohammad Shahverdikondori , Elena Zheleva

In production systems, contextual bandit approaches often rely on direct reward models that take both action and context as input. However, these models can suffer from confounding, making it difficult to isolate the effect of the action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Alexandre Gilotte , Otmane Sakhi , Imad Aouali , Benjamin Heymann

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Yiling Jia , Weitong Zhang , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu , Hongning Wang

In this paper we propose a novel framework for decentralized, online learning by many learners. At each moment of time, an instance characterized by a certain context may arrive to each learner; based on the context, the learner can select…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-24 Cem Tekin , Mihaela van der Schaar

Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-18 Maria Dimakopoulou , Zhengyuan Zhou , Susan Athey , Guido Imbens

Contextual bandits have emerged as a cornerstone in reinforcement learning, enabling systems to make decisions with partial feedback. However, as contexts grow in complexity, traditional bandit algorithms can face challenges in adequately…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Ali Baheri , Cecilia O. Alm

Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-18 Maria Dimakopoulou , Zhengyuan Zhou , Susan Athey , Guido Imbens

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-20 Lihong Li , Yu Lu , Dengyong Zhou

We address the problem of learning in an online, bandit setting where the learner must repeatedly select among $K$ actions, but only receives partial feedback based on its choices. We establish two new facts: First, using a new algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-10-28 Alina Beygelzimer , John Langford , Lihong Li , Lev Reyzin , Robert E. Schapire

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) is at the core of fine-tuning methods for generative AI models for language and images. Such feedback is often sought as rank or preference feedback from human raters, as opposed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Akhil Agnihotri , Rahul Jain , Deepak Ramachandran , Zheng Wen

Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Daniel Shin , Anca D. Dragan , Daniel S. Brown

In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, instance-dependent algorithms attain improved performance on "easy" problems with a gap between the best and second-best arm. Are similar guarantees possible for contextual bandits? While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin , David Simchi-Levi , Yunzong Xu