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In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, instance-dependent algorithms attain improved performance on "easy" problems with a gap between the best and second-best arm. Are similar guarantees possible for contextual bandits? While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin , David Simchi-Levi , Yunzong Xu

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

Contextual dueling bandit is used to model the bandit problems, where a learner's goal is to find the best arm for a given context using observed noisy human preference feedback over the selected arms for the past contexts. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Arun Verma , Zhongxiang Dai , Xiaoqiang Lin , Patrick Jaillet , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

This work addresses the efficiency concern on inferring a nonlinear contextual bandit when the number of arms $n$ is very large. We propose a neural bandit model with an end-to-end training process to efficiently perform bandit algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-21 Yun Da Tsai , Shou De Lin

Online learning in large-scale structured bandits is known to be challenging due to the curse of dimensionality. In this paper, we propose a unified meta-learning framework for a general class of structured bandit problems where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Runzhe Wan , Lin Ge , Rui Song

We consider the problem of contextual multi-armed bandits in the setting of hypothesis transfer learning. That is, we assume having access to a previously learned model on an unobserved set of contexts, and we leverage it in order to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Steven Bilaj , Sofien Dhouib , Setareh Maghsudi

Real-world applications of contextual bandits often exhibit non-stationarity due to seasonality, serendipity, and evolving social trends. While a number of non-stationary contextual bandit learning algorithms have been proposed in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Zheqing Zhu , Yueyang Liu , Xu Kuang , Benjamin Van Roy

Thompson sampling is an efficient algorithm for sequential decision making, which exploits the posterior uncertainty to address the exploration-exploitation dilemma. There has been significant recent interest in integrating Bayesian neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-07 Zhendong Wang , Mingyuan Zhou

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-27 Amaury Gouverneur , Borja Rodríguez-Gálvez , Tobias J. Oechtering , Mikael Skoglund

Ensemble methods are among the state-of-the-art predictive modeling approaches. Applied to modern big data, these methods often require a large number of sub-learners, where the complexity of each learner typically grows with the size of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-29 Amichai Painsky , Saharon Rosset

We introduce the cram method as a general statistical framework for evaluating the final learned policy from a multi-armed contextual bandit algorithm, using the dataset generated by the same bandit algorithm. The proposed on-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Zeyang Jia , Kosuke Imai , Michael Lingzhi Li

Sampling from the equilibrium distribution has always been a major problem in molecular simulations due to the very high dimensionality of conformational space. Over several decades, many approaches have been used to overcome the problem.…

Computational Physics · Physics 2020-03-02 Adrià Pérez , Pablo Herrera-Nieto , Stefan Doerr , Gianni De Fabritiis

We study contextual bandits in the presence of a stage-wise constraint when the constraint must be satisfied both with high probability and in expectation. We start with the linear case where both the reward function and the stage-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Aldo Pacchiano , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Peter Bartlett

Thompson Sampling (TS) is one of the most effective algorithms for solving contextual multi-armed bandit problems. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, called Neural Thompson Sampling, which adapts deep neural networks for both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Weitong Zhang , Dongruo Zhou , Lihong Li , Quanquan Gu

In this paper, we study utilizing neural networks for the exploitation and exploration of contextual multi-armed bandits. Contextual multi-armed bandits have been studied for decades with various applications. To solve the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yikun Ban , Yuchen Yan , Arindam Banerjee , Jingrui He

We study a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, where at each time step, the player observes an independently sampled context that determines the arms' mean rewards. However, playing an arm blocks it (across all contexts) for a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Soumya Basu , Orestis Papadigenopoulos , Constantine Caramanis , Sanjay Shakkottai

Thompson Sampling has recently been shown to be optimal in the Bernoulli Multi-Armed Bandit setting[Kaufmann et al., 2012]. This bandit problem assumes stationary distributions for the rewards. It is often unrealistic to model the real…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-02-18 Joseph Mellor , Jonathan Shapiro

Contextual bandits are widely used in Internet services from news recommendation to advertising, and to Web search. Generalized linear models (logistical regression in particular) have demonstrated stronger performance than linear models in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-20 Lihong Li , Yu Lu , Dengyong Zhou

Tree-based ensemble methods, as Random Forests and Gradient Boosted Trees, have been successfully used for regression in many applications and research studies. Furthermore, these methods have been extended in order to deal with uncertainty…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-20 Myriam Tami , Marianne Clausel , Emilie Devijver , Adrien Dulac , Eric Gaussier , Stefan Janaqi , Meriam Chebre

We consider the problem of contextual bandits with stochastic experts, which is a variation of the traditional stochastic contextual bandit with experts problem. In our problem setting, we assume access to a class of stochastic experts,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-04 Rajat Sen , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Nihal Sharma , Sanjay Shakkottai