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Related papers: Efficient and Interpretable Bandit Algorithms

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Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) is arguably the most commonly used method for linear multi-arm bandit problems. While conceptually and computationally simple, this method highly relies on the confidence bounds, failing to strike the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-05 Kaige Yang , Laura Toni

Mechanistic interpretability aims to explain neural model behaviour by reverse-engineering learned computational structure into human-understandable components. Without a formal framework, however, mechanistic explanations cannot be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Ward Gauderis , Thomas Dooms , Steven T. Holmer , Kola Ayonrinde , Geraint A. Wiggins

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)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Siyu Chen , Yitan Wang , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

We study finite-armed semiparametric bandits, where each arm's reward combines a linear component with an unknown, potentially adversarial shift. This model strictly generalizes classical linear bandits and reflects complexities common in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-18 Seok-Jin Kim , Gi-Soo Kim , Min-hwan Oh

We consider the general (stochastic) contextual bandit problem under the realizability assumption, i.e., the expected reward, as a function of contexts and actions, belongs to a general function class $\mathcal{F}$. We design a fast and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 David Simchi-Levi , Yunzong Xu

We study linear contextual bandits with access to a large, confounded, offline dataset that was sampled from some fixed policy. We show that this problem is closely related to a variant of the bandit problem with side information. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-11 Guy Tennenholtz , Uri Shalit , Shie Mannor , Yonathan Efroni

This paper deals with bandit online learning problems involving feedback of unknown delay that can emerge in multi-armed bandit (MAB) and bandit convex optimization (BCO) settings. MAB and BCO require only values of the objective function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Bingcong Li , Tianyi Chen , Georgios B. Giannakis

Modifying the reward-biased maximum likelihood method originally proposed in the adaptive control literature, we propose novel learning algorithms to handle the explore-exploit trade-off in linear bandits problems as well as generalized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-09 Yu-Heng Hung , Ping-Chun Hsieh , Xi Liu , P. R. Kumar

We propose the first contextual bandit algorithm that is parameter-free, efficient, and optimal in terms of dynamic regret. Specifically, our algorithm achieves dynamic regret $\mathcal{O}(\min\{\sqrt{ST},…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-19 Yifang Chen , Chung-Wei Lee , Haipeng Luo , Chen-Yu Wei

We consider the stochastic linear (multi-armed) contextual bandit problem with the possibility of hidden simple multi-armed bandit structure in which the rewards are independent of the contextual information. Algorithms that are designed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-07 Niladri S. Chatterji , Vidya Muthukumar , Peter L. Bartlett

Motivated by a natural problem in online model selection with bandit information, we introduce and analyze a best arm identification problem in the rested bandit setting, wherein arm expected losses decrease with the number of times the arm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-08 Leonardo Cella , Claudio Gentile , Massimiliano Pontil

Adaptive and sequential experiment design is a well-studied area in numerous domains. We survey and synthesize the work of the online statistical learning paradigm referred to as multi-armed bandits integrating the existing research as a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-11-04 Giuseppe Burtini , Jason Loeppky , Ramon Lawrence

Interpretability has become an essential topic for artificial intelligence in some high-risk domains such as healthcare, bank and security. For commonly-used tabular data, traditional methods trained end-to-end machine learning models with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-08-18 Haixiao Chi , Dawei Wang , Gaojie Cui , Feng Mao , Beishui Liao

Predictive coding is an influential theory of cortical function which posits that the principal computation the brain performs, which underlies both perception and learning, is the minimization of prediction errors. While motivated by…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2020-10-13 Beren Millidge , Alexander Tschantz , Anil Seth , Christopher L Buckley

We analytically derive a class of optimal solutions to a linear program (LP) for automated mechanism design that satisfies efficiency, incentive compatibility, strong budget balance (SBB), and individual rationality (IR), where SBB and IR…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Takayuki Osogami , Hirota Kinoshita , Segev Wasserkrug

Exploration policies in Bayesian bandits maximize the average reward over problem instances drawn from some distribution $\mathcal{P}$. In this work, we learn such policies for an unknown distribution $\mathcal{P}$ using samples from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Craig Boutilier , Chih-Wei Hsu , Branislav Kveton , Martin Mladenov , Csaba Szepesvari , Manzil Zaheer

Recently, several studies (Zhou et al., 2021a; Zhang et al., 2021b; Kim et al., 2021; Zhou and Gu, 2022) have provided variance-dependent regret bounds for linear contextual bandits, which interpolates the regret for the worst-case regime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Heyang Zhao , Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Tong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

We consider a multi-armed bandit problem motivated by situations where only the extreme values, as opposed to expected values in the classical bandit setting, are of interest. We propose distribution free algorithms using robust statistics…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-09-10 Sujay Bhatt , Ping Li , Gennady Samorodnitsky

High-quality data plays a central role in ensuring the accuracy of policy evaluation. This paper initiates the study of efficient and safe data collection for bandit policy evaluation. We formulate the problem and investigate its several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Runzhe Wan , Branislav Kveton , Rui Song

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