Related papers: Efficient Transfer Learning via Causal Bounds

We consider the problem of designing contextual bandit algorithms in the ``cross-learning'' setting of Balseiro et al., where the learner observes the loss for the action they play in all possible contexts, not just the context of the…

Causal models bring many benefits to decision-making systems (or agents) by making them interpretable, sample-efficient, and robust to changes in the input distribution. However, spurious correlations can lead to wrong causal models and…

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…

We consider the problem of using observational bandit feedback data from multiple heterogeneous data sources to learn a personalized decision policy that robustly generalizes across diverse target settings. To achieve this, we propose a…

In causal inference, interference occurs when the treatment of one unit may affect the outcomes of other units. The goal of this work is to serve as a guide to the use of linear outcome modeling for estimating causal effects in settings…

We introduce a novel online learning framework that unifies and generalizes pre-established models, such as delayed and corrupted feedback, to encompass adversarial environments where action feedback evolves over time. In this setting, the…

Estimating causal effects on networks is challenging because treatments may affect both treated units and their neighbors, while network homophily induces dependence and confounding. These challenges are amplified when causal effects are…

Most of previous machine learning algorithms are proposed based on the i.i.d. hypothesis. However, this ideal assumption is often violated in real applications, where selection bias may arise between training and testing process. Moreover,…

A common concern when a policymaker draws causal inferences from and makes decisions based on observational data is that the measured covariates are insufficiently rich to account for all sources of confounding, i.e., the standard no…

We propose a simple model selection approach for algorithms in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. As opposed to prior work that (implicitly) assumes knowledge of the optimal regret, we only require that each base…

Stochastic linear bandits are a fundamental model for sequential decision making, where an agent selects a vector-valued action and receives a noisy reward with expected value given by an unknown linear function. Although well studied in…

Transfer learning has become an essential technique for utilizing information from source datasets to improve the performance of the target task. However, in the context of high-dimensional data, heterogeneity arises due to heteroscedastic…

Distributionally robust optimization tackles out-of-sample issues like overfitting and distribution shifts by adopting an adversarial approach over a range of possible data distributions, known as the ambiguity set. To balance conservatism…

Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the strategy deployed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. Further, often we have only partial information on the state of the system. We study the…

We study the offline contextual bandit problem, where we aim to acquire an optimal policy using observational data. However, this data usually contains two deficiencies: (i) some variables that confound actions are not observed, and (ii)…

We study a generalization of the problem of online learning in adversarial linear contextual bandits by incorporating loss functions that belong to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, which allows for a more flexible modeling of complex…

The goal of ordinal embedding is to represent items as points in a low-dimensional Euclidean space given a set of constraints in the form of distance comparisons like "item $i$ is closer to item $j$ than item $k$". Ordinal constraints like…

Extracting actionable intelligence from distributed, heterogeneous, correlated and high-dimensional data sources requires run-time processing and learning both locally and globally. In the last decade, a large number of meta-learning…

Constructing confidence intervals that are simultaneously valid across a class of estimates is central to tasks such as multiple mean estimation, generalization guarantees, and adaptive experimental design. We frame this as an ``error…

Estimating average causal effect (ACE) is useful whenever we want to know the effect of an intervention on a given outcome. In the absence of a randomized experiment, many methods such as stratification and inverse propensity weighting have…