Related papers: Follow-ups Also Matter: Improving Contextual Bandi…

Contextual bandit algorithms provide principled online learning solutions to balance the exploitation-exploration trade-off in various applications such as recommender systems. However, the learning speed of the traditional contextual…

Online recommendation services recommend multiple commodities to users. Nowadays, a considerable proportion of users visit e-commerce platforms by mobile devices. Due to the limited screen size of mobile devices, positions of items have a…

The rise of large-scale pretrained models has made it feasible to generate predictive or synthetic features at low cost, raising the question of how to incorporate such surrogate predictions into downstream decision-making. We study this…

Conversational contextual bandits elicit user preferences by occasionally querying for explicit feedback on key-terms to accelerate learning. However, there are aspects of existing approaches which limit their performance. First,…

We study the Linear Contextual Bandit problem in the hybrid reward setting. In this setting every arm's reward model contains arm specific parameters in addition to parameters shared across the reward models of all the arms. We can reduce…

A contextual bandit problem is studied in a highly non-stationary environment, which is ubiquitous in various recommender systems due to the time-varying interests of users. Two models with disjoint and hybrid payoffs are considered to…

Personalized recommendations for new users, also known as the cold-start problem, can be formulated as a contextual bandit problem. Existing contextual bandit algorithms generally rely on features alone to capture user variability. Such…

In this paper, we investigate the impact of context diversity on stochastic linear contextual bandits. As opposed to the previous view that contexts lead to more difficult bandit learning, we show that when the contexts are sufficiently…

Multi-armed bandit algorithms have become a reference solution for handling the explore/exploit dilemma in recommender systems, and many other important real-world problems, such as display advertisement. However, such algorithms usually…

We consider the contextual bandit problem where at each time, the agent only has access to a noisy version of the context and the error variance (or an estimator of this variance). This setting is motivated by a wide range of applications…

In this paper, we propose and study opportunistic contextual bandits - a special case of contextual bandits where the exploration cost varies under different environmental conditions, such as network load or return variation in…

Contextual bandits are widely used in industrial personalization systems. These online learning frameworks learn a treatment assignment policy in the presence of treatment effects that vary with the observed contextual features of the…

Contextual bandits are incredibly useful in many practical problems. We go one step further by devising a more realistic problem that combines: (1) contextual bandits with dense arm features, (2) non-linear reward functions, and (3) a…

Many sequential decision-making problems in communication networks can be modeled as contextual bandit problems, which are natural extensions of the well-known multi-armed bandit problem. In contextual bandit problems, at each time, an…

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…

Contextual bandits are widely-used in the study of learning-based control policies for finite action spaces. While the problem is well-studied for bandits with perfectly observed context vectors, little is known about the case of…

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…

A standard assumption in contextual multi-arm bandit is that the true context is perfectly known before arm selection. Nonetheless, in many practical applications (e.g., cloud resource management), prior to arm selection, the context…

The contextual bandit has been identified as a powerful framework to formulate the recommendation process as a sequential decision-making process, where each item is regarded as an arm and the objective is to minimize the regret of $T$…

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…