English
Related papers

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

200 papers

Contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms have been shown promising for maximizing cumulative rewards in sequential decision tasks such as news article recommendation systems, web page ad placement algorithms, and mobile health.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-01 Gi-Soo Kim , Myunghee Cho Paik

In stochastic contextual bandits, an agent sequentially makes actions from a time-dependent action set based on past experience to minimize the cumulative regret. Like many other machine learning algorithms, the performance of bandits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Yue Kang , Cho-Jui Hsieh , Thomas C. M. Lee

Motivated by applications in online bidding and sleeping bandits, we examine the problem of contextual bandits with cross learning, where the learner observes the loss associated with the action across all possible contexts, not just the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Ruiyuan Huang , Zengfeng Huang

Dueling bandits is a prominent framework for decision-making involving preferential feedback, a valuable feature that fits various applications involving human interaction, such as ranking, information retrieval, and recommendation systems.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Qiwei Di , Tao Jin , Yue Wu , Heyang Zhao , Farzad Farnoud , Quanquan Gu

Contextual bandits are online learners that, given an input, select an arm and receive a reward for that arm. They use the reward as a learning signal and aim to maximize the total reward over the inputs. Contextual bandits are commonly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-14 Awni Hannun , Brian Knott , Shubho Sengupta , Laurens van der Maaten

In this paper, we study a cold-start problem in recommendation systems where we have completely new users entered the systems. There is not any interaction or feedback of the new users with the systems previoustly, thus no ratings are…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2014-05-30 Hai Thanh Nguyen , Jérémie Mary , Philippe Preux

We introduce a stochastic contextual bandit model where at each time step the environment chooses a distribution over a context set and samples the context from this distribution. The learner observes only the context distribution while the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-15 Johannes Kirschner , Andreas Krause

The contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is crucial in sequential decision-making. A line of research, known as online clustering of bandits, extends contextual MAB by grouping similar users into clusters, utilizing shared features…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Zhuohua Li , Maoli Liu , Xiangxiang Dai , John C. S. Lui

While classical formulations of multi-armed bandit problems assume that each arm's reward is independent and stationary, real-world applications often involve non-stationary environments and interdependencies between arms. In particular,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Ryoma Sato , Shinji Ito

We study the $K$-armed contextual dueling bandit problem, a sequential decision making setting in which the learner uses contextual information to make two decisions, but only observes \emph{preference-based feedback} suggesting that one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-25 Aadirupa Saha , Akshay Krishnamurthy

Recommendation systems are dynamic economic systems that balance the needs of multiple stakeholders. A recent line of work studies incentives from the content providers' point of view. Content providers, e.g., vloggers and bloggers,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-13 Omer Ben-Porat , Rotem Torkan

Contextual multi-armed bandits are classical models in reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making associated with individual information. A widely-used policy for bandits is Thompson Sampling, where samples from a data-driven…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-30 Hongju Park , Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh

The recent advances of conversational recommendations provide a promising way to efficiently elicit users' preferences via conversational interactions. To achieve this, the recommender system conducts conversations with users, asking their…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-09-14 Jinhang Zuo , Songwen Hu , Tong Yu , Shuai Li , Handong Zhao , Carlee Joe-Wong

We study an online decision making problem where on each round a learner chooses a list of items based on some side information, receives a scalar feedback value for each individual item, and a reward that is linearly related to this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-07 Akshay Krishnamurthy , Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudik

We consider the regret minimization task in a dueling bandits problem with context information. In every round of the sequential decision problem, the learner makes a context-dependent selection of two choice alternatives (arms) to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Viktor Bengs , Aadirupa Saha , Eyke Hüllermeier

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Ruohan Zhan , Susan Athey , Emma Brunskill

Contextual bandit algorithms are extremely popular and widely used in recommendation systems to provide online personalised recommendations. A recurrent assumption is the stationarity of the reward function, which is rather unrealistic in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-04-29 Giuseppe Di Benedetto , Vito Bellini , Giovanni Zappella

This paper presents a new algorithm for neural contextual bandits (CBs) that addresses the challenge of delayed reward feedback, where the reward for a chosen action is revealed after a random, unknown delay. This scenario is common in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Mohammadali Moghimi , Sharu Theresa Jose , Shana Moothedath

We introduce a Multi-User Contextual Cascading Bandit model, a new combinatorial bandit framework that captures realistic online advertising scenarios where multiple users interact with sequentially displayed items simultaneously. Unlike…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Jiho Park , Huiwen Jia