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Recent work shows that when contexts are drawn i.i.d., linear contextual bandits can be reduced to single-context linear bandits. This ``contexts are cheap" perspective is highly advantageous, as it allows for sharper finite-time analyses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Kaan Buyukkalayci , Osama Hanna , Christina Fragouli

Online learning algorithms, widely used to power search and content optimization on the web, must balance exploration and exploitation, potentially sacrificing the experience of current users in order to gain information that will lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Manish Raghavan , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Jennifer Wortman Vaughan , Zhiwei Steven Wu

Personalized recommendations for new users, also known as the cold-start problem, can be formulated as a contextual bandit problem. Existing contextual bandit algorithms generally rely on features alone to capture user variability. Such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-25 Li Zhou , Emma Brunskill

Parametric, feature-based reward models are employed by a variety of algorithms in decision-making settings such as bandits and Markov decision processes (MDPs). The typical assumption under which the algorithms are analysed is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Debangshu Banerjee , Aditya Gopalan

We investigate a novel cluster-of-bandit algorithm CAB for collaborative recommendation tasks that implements the underlying feedback sharing mechanism by estimating the neighborhood of users in a context-dependent manner. CAB makes sharp…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-28 Claudio Gentile , Shuai Li , Purushottam Kar , Alexandros Karatzoglou , Evans Etrue , Giovanni Zappella

Motivated by the phenomenon of strategic agents gaming a recommender system to maximize the number of times they are recommended to users, we study a strategic variant of the linear contextual bandit problem, where the arms can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-27 Thomas Kleine Buening , Aadirupa Saha , Christos Dimitrakakis , Haifeng Xu

We consider the problem where M agents collaboratively interact with an instance of a stochastic K-armed contextual bandit, where K>>M. The goal of the agents is to simultaneously minimize the cumulative regret over all the agents over a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-16 Jiabin Lin , Shana Moothedath

The causal bandit problem seeks to identify, through sequential experimentation, an intervention that maximizes the expected reward in a causal system modeled by a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Existing methods typically assume that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yijia Zhao , Qing Zhou

Learning from human feedback plays an important role in aligning generative models, such as large language models (LLM). However, the effectiveness of this approach can be influenced by adversaries, who may intentionally provide misleading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Qiwei Di , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

In this paper, we analyze the problem of online convex optimization in different settings, including different feedback types (full-information/semi-bandit/bandit/etc) in either stochastic or non-stochastic setting and different notions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Mohammad Pedramfar , Vaneet Aggarwal

Contextual sequential decision-making problems play a crucial role in machine learning, encompassing a wide range of downstream applications such as bandits, sequential hypothesis testing and online risk control. These applications often…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-31 Haichen Hu , Rui Ai , Stephen Bates , David Simchi-Levi

In causal bandit problems, the action set consists of interventions on variables of a causal graph. Several researchers have recently studied such bandit problems and pointed out their practical applications. However, all existing works…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-11 Yangyi Lu , Amirhossein Meisami , Ambuj Tewari

We study a graph bandit setting where the objective of the learner is to detect the most influential node of a graph by requesting as little information from the graph as possible. One of the relevant applications for this setting is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Alexandra Carpentier , Michal Valko

We study a variant of causal contextual bandits where the context is chosen based on an initial intervention chosen by the learner. At the beginning of each round, the learner selects an initial action, depending on which a stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Rahul Madhavan , Aurghya Maiti , Gaurav Sinha , Siddharth Barman

Contextual bandit learning is an increasingly popular approach to optimizing recommender systems via user feedback, but can be slow to converge in practice due to the need for exploring a large feature space. In this paper, we propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-03 Yisong Yue , Sue Ann Hong , Carlos Guestrin

Contextual bandits are incredibly useful in many practical problems. We go one step further by devising a more realistic problem that combines: (1) contextual bandits with dense arm features, (2) non-linear reward functions, and (3) a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Wei Min Loh , Sajib Kumer Sinha , Ankur Agarwal , Pascal Poupart

The rich body of Bandit literature not only offers a diverse toolbox of algorithms, but also makes it hard for a practitioner to find the right solution to solve the problem at hand. Typical textbooks on Bandits focus on designing and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-05 Yi Liu , Lihong Li

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Yao Wang , Jiannan Li , Yue Kang , Shanxing Gao , Zhenxin Xiao

We study the problem of incentive-compatible online learning with bandit feedback. In this class of problems, the experts are self-interested agents who might misrepresent their preferences with the goal of being selected most often. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-13 Julian Zimmert , Teodor V. Marinov

Combinatorial bandits with semi-bandit feedback generalize multi-armed bandits, where the agent chooses sets of arms and observes a noisy reward for each arm contained in the chosen set. The action set satisfies a given structure such as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-22 Marc Jourdan , Mojmír Mutný , Johannes Kirschner , Andreas Krause