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Related papers: Efficient Transfer Learning via Causal Bounds

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Autoregressive processes naturally arise in a large variety of real-world scenarios, including stock markets, sales forecasting, weather prediction, advertising, and pricing. When facing a sequential decision-making problem in such a…

Adapting to latent confounded shift remains a core challenge in modern AI. This setting is driven by hidden variables that induce spurious correlations between inputs and outputs during training, leading models to rely on non-causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Jialin Yu , Yuxiang Zhou , Haoxuan Li , Junchi Yu , Mengyue Yang , Yulan He , Nevin L. Zhang , Philip Torr , Ricardo Silva

We aim to design strategies for sequential decision making that adjust to the difficulty of the learning problem. We study this question both in the setting of prediction with expert advice, and for more general combinatorial decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-02 Wouter M. Koolen , Tim van Erven

Contextual bandit learning is a reinforcement learning problem where the learner repeatedly receives a set of features (context), takes an action and receives a reward based on the action and context. We consider this problem under a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-05 Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudík , Satyen Kale , John Langford , Robert E. Schapire

We address the problem of integrating data from multiple, possibly biased, observational and interventional studies, to eventually compute counterfactuals in structural causal models. We start from the case of a single observational dataset…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-03-17 Marco Zaffalon , Alessandro Antonucci , David Huber , Rafael Cabañas

This paper investigates the robustness of causal bandits (CBs) in the face of temporal model fluctuations. This setting deviates from the existing literature's widely-adopted assumption of constant causal models. The focus is on causal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-14 Zirui Yan , Arpan Mukherjee , Burak Varıcı , Ali Tajer

Randomized A/B tests within online learning platforms represent an exciting direction in learning sciences. With minimal assumptions, they allow causal effect estimation without confounding bias and exact statistical inference even in small…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-06-13 Adam C. Sales , Ethan B. Prihar , Johann A. Gagnon-Bartsch , Neil T. Heffernan

We study the sequential batch learning problem in linear contextual bandits with finite action sets, where the decision maker is constrained to split incoming individuals into (at most) a fixed number of batches and can only observe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-15 Yanjun Han , Zhengqing Zhou , Zhengyuan Zhou , Jose Blanchet , Peter W. Glynn , Yinyu Ye

In this study, a scalable online kernel learning framework is proposed for estimating bidirectional causal effects in systems characterized by mutual dependence and heteroskedasticity. Traditional causal inference often focuses on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-24 Masahiro Tanaka

This paper addresses the problem of estimating causal effects when adjustment variables in the back-door or front-door criterion are partially observed. For such scenarios, we derive bounds on the causal effects by solving two non-linear…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-06-24 Ang Li , Judea Pearl

The Causal Bandit is a variant of the classic Bandit problem where an agent must identify the best action in a sequential decision-making process, where the reward distribution of the actions displays a non-trivial dependence structure that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-30 Arnoud A. W. M. de Kroon , Danielle Belgrave , Joris M. Mooij

The real-world testing of decisions made using causal machine learning models is an essential prerequisite for their successful application. We focus on evaluating and improving contextual treatment assignment decisions: these are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-13 Desi R. Ivanova , Joel Jennings , Cheng Zhang , Adam Foster

Estimation of individual treatment effects is commonly used as the basis for contextual decision making in fields such as healthcare, education, and economics. However, it is often sufficient for the decision maker to have estimates of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-13 Maggie Makar , Fredrik D. Johansson , John Guttag , David Sontag

We study a class of adversarial bandit optimization problems in which the loss functions may be non-convex and non-smooth. In each round, the learner observes a loss that consists of an underlying linear component together with an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Zhuoyu Cheng , Kohei Hatano , Eiji Takimoto

We study the problem of learning 'good' interventions in a stochastic environment modeled by its underlying causal graph. Good interventions refer to interventions that maximize rewards. Specifically, we consider the setting of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Fateme Jamshidi , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash

In the stochastic bandit problem, the goal is to maximize an unknown function via a sequence of noisy evaluations. Typically, the observation noise is assumed to be independent of the evaluation point and to satisfy a tail bound uniformly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-04-20 Johannes Kirschner , Andreas Krause

Due to the challenge posed by multi-source and heterogeneous data collected from diverse environments, causal relationships among features can exhibit variations influenced by different time spans, regions, or strategies. This diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Lu Liu , Yang Tang , Kexuan Zhang , Qiyu Sun

We introduce data-driven decision-making algorithms that achieve state-of-the-art \emph{dynamic regret} bounds for non-stationary bandit settings. These settings capture applications such as advertisement allocation, dynamic pricing, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Wang Chi Cheung , David Simchi-Levi , Ruihao Zhu

Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-07 Branislav Kveton , Martin Mladenov , Chih-Wei Hsu , Manzil Zaheer , Csaba Szepesvari , Craig Boutilier

Sequential design of experiments for optimizing a reward function in causal systems can be effectively modeled by the sequential design of interventions in causal bandits (CBs). In the existing literature on CBs, a critical assumption is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-06 Zirui Yan , Arpan Mukherjee , Burak Varıcı , Ali Tajer