Related papers: Neural Contextual Bandits for Personalized Recomme…
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…
Personalization is a crucial aspect of many online experiences. In particular, content ranking is often a key component in delivering sophisticated personalization results. Commonly, supervised learning-to-rank methods are applied, which…
Information-directed sampling (IDS) has recently demonstrated its potential as a data-efficient reinforcement learning algorithm. However, it is still unclear what is the right form of information ratio to optimize when contextual…
We present an adaptive learning Intelligent Tutoring System, which uses model-based reinforcement learning in the form of contextual bandits to assign learning activities to students. The model is trained on the trajectories of thousands of…
Contextual bandit algorithms are applied in a wide range of domains, from advertising to recommender systems, from clinical trials to education. In many of these domains, malicious agents may have incentives to attack the bandit algorithm…
The contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a widely used framework for problems requiring sequential decision-making under uncertainty, such as recommendation systems. In applications involving a large number of users, the performance of…
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,…
Link prediction is a critical problem in graph learning with broad applications such as recommender systems and knowledge graph completion. Numerous research efforts have been directed at solving this problem, including approaches based on…
Contextual bandit is a general framework for online learning in sequential decision-making problems that has found application in a wide range of domains, including recommendation systems, online advertising, and clinical trials. A critical…
In this work, we describe practical lessons we have learned from successfully using contextual bandits (CBs) to improve key business metrics of the Microsoft Virtual Agent for customer support. While our current use cases focus on single…
We study identifying user clusters in contextual multi-armed bandits (MAB). Contextual MAB is an effective tool for many real applications, such as content recommendation and online advertisement. In practice, user dependency plays an…
Clinical trials involving multiple treatments utilize randomization of the treatment assignments to enable the evaluation of treatment efficacies in an unbiased manner. Such evaluation is performed in post hoc studies that usually use…
Most existing approaches in Context-Aware Recommender Systems (CRS) focus on recommending relevant items to users taking into account contextual information, such as time, location, or social aspects. However, few of them have considered…
We study here the problem of learning the exploration exploitation trade-off in the contextual bandit problem with linear reward function setting. In the traditional algorithms that solve the contextual bandit problem, the exploration is a…
Causal bandit is a nascent learning model where an agent sequentially experiments in a causal network of variables, in order to identify the reward-maximizing intervention. Despite the model's wide applicability, existing analytical results…
We revisit the finite-armed linear bandit model by Nelson et al. (2022), where contexts and rewards are governed by a finite hidden Markov chain. Nelson et al. (2022) approach this model by a reduction to linear contextual bandits; but to…
Contextual bandits often provide simple and effective personalization in decision making problems, making them popular tools to deliver personalized interventions in mobile health as well as other health applications. However, when bandits…
Contextual bandits can solve a huge range of real-world problems. However, current popular algorithms to solve them either rely on linear models, or unreliable uncertainty estimation in non-linear models, which are required to deal with the…
Contextual bandits have the same exploration-exploitation trade-off as standard multi-armed bandits. On adding positive externalities that decay with time, this problem becomes much more difficult as wrong decisions at the start are hard to…
The matrix contextual bandit (CB), as an extension of the well-known multi-armed bandit, is a powerful framework that has been widely applied in sequential decision-making scenarios involving low-rank structure. In many real-world…