Related papers: Robustly Improving Bandit Algorithms with Confound…
Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving many real-world interactive machine learning problems. Despite multiple recent successes on statistically and computationally efficient methods, the practical behavior of these…
The contextual duelling bandit problem models adaptive recommender systems, where the algorithm presents a set of items to the user, and the user's choice reveals their preference. This setup is well suited for implicit choices users make…
We consider a novel variant of the contextual bandit problem (i.e., the multi-armed bandit with side-information, or context, available to a decision-maker) where the reward associated with each context-based decision may not always be…
This paper considers a contextual bandit problem involving multiple agents, where a learner sequentially observes the contexts and the agent's reported arms, and then selects the arm that maximizes the system's overall reward. Existing work…
This paper considers two fundamental sequential decision-making problems: the problem of prediction with expert advice and the multi-armed bandit problem. We focus on stochastic regimes in which an adversary may corrupt losses, and we…
Continuously learning and leveraging the knowledge accumulated from prior tasks in order to improve future performance is a long standing machine learning problem. In this paper, we study the problem in the multi-armed bandit framework with…
For infinite action contextual bandits, smoothed regret and reduction to regression results in state-of-the-art online performance with computational cost independent of the action set: unfortunately, the resulting data exhaust does not…
This paper studies bandit convex optimization with constraints, where the learner aims to generate a sequence of decisions under partial information of loss functions such that the cumulative loss is reduced as well as the cumulative…
This paper considers the distributed bandit convex optimization problem with time-varying constraints. In this problem, the global loss function is the average of all the local convex loss functions, which are unknown beforehand. Each agent…
We study the challenging exploration incentive problem in both bandit and reinforcement learning, where the rewards are scale-free and potentially unbounded, driven by real-world scenarios and differing from existing work. Past works in…
In this work, we study the performance of the Thompson Sampling algorithm for Contextual Bandit problems based on the framework introduced by Neu et al. and their concept of lifted information ratio. First, we prove a comprehensive bound on…
We study how to adapt to smoothly-varying ('easy') environments in well-known online learning problems where acquiring information is expensive. For the problem of label efficient prediction, which is a budgeted version of prediction with…
In $K$-armed dueling bandits, the learner receives preference feedback between arms, and the regret of an arm is defined in terms of its suboptimality to a $\textit{winner}$ arm. The $\textit{non-stationary}$ variant of the problem,…
We study the $K$-armed dueling bandit problem, a variation of the standard stochastic bandit problem where the feedback is limited to relative comparisons of a pair of arms. We introduce a tight asymptotic regret lower bound that is based…
Contextual bandits serve as a fundamental model for many sequential decision making tasks. The most popular theoretically justified approaches are based on the optimism principle. While these algorithms can be practical, they are known to…
In high-stakes AI applications, even a single action can cause irreparable damage. However, nearly all of sequential decision-making theory assumes that all errors are recoverable (e.g., by bounding rewards). Standard bandit algorithms that…
We consider a novel variant of the contextual bandit problem (i.e., the multi-armed bandit with side-information, or context, available to a decision-maker) where the context used at each decision may be corrupted ("useless context"). This…
In this paper we consider the problem of online stochastic optimization of a locally smooth function under bandit feedback. We introduce the high-confidence tree (HCT) algorithm, a novel any-time $\mathcal{X}$-armed bandit algorithm, and…
Exposure bias is a well-known issue in recommender systems where items and suppliers are not equally represented in the recommendation results. This bias becomes particularly problematic over time as a few items are repeatedly…
This paper identifies and addresses dynamic selection problems in online learning algorithms with endogenous data. In a contextual multi-armed bandit model, a novel bias (self-fulfilling bias) arises because the endogeneity of the data…