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The safe linear bandit problem is a version of the classical stochastic linear bandit problem where the learner's actions must satisfy an uncertain constraint at all rounds. Due its applicability to many real-world settings, this problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Spencer Hutchinson , Berkay Turan , Mahnoosh Alizadeh

We consider online learning problems under a partial observability model capturing situations where the information conveyed to the learner is between full information and bandit feedback. In the simplest variant, we assume that in addition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Tomas Kocak , Gergely Neu , Michal Valko , Remi Munos

Designing efficient general-purpose contextual bandit algorithms that work with large -- or even continuous -- action spaces would facilitate application to important scenarios such as information retrieval, recommendation systems, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Yinglun Zhu , Paul Mineiro

We consider the contextual bandit problem on general action and context spaces, where the learner's rewards depend on their selected actions and an observable context. This generalizes the standard multi-armed bandit to the case where side…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-03 Moise Blanchard , Steve Hanneke , Patrick Jaillet

We study the effectiveness of stochastic side information in deterministic online learning scenarios. We propose a forecaster to predict a deterministic sequence where its performance is evaluated against an expert class. We assume that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-13 Junzhang Jia , Xuetong Wu , Jingge Zhu , Jamie Evans

We study a generalization of the problem of online learning in adversarial linear contextual bandits by incorporating loss functions that belong to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, which allows for a more flexible modeling of complex…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-04 Gergely Neu , Julia Olkhovskaya , Sattar Vakili

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

We introduce the problem of model selection for contextual bandits, where a learner must adapt to the complexity of the optimal policy while balancing exploration and exploitation. Our main result is a new model selection guarantee for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-15 Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Haipeng Luo

With the fast development of big data, learning the optimal decision rule by recursively updating it and making online decisions has been easier than before. We study the online statistical inference of model parameters in a contextual…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-22 Xiangyu Chang , Xi Chen , Zehua Lai , He Li , Zhihong Liu , Yichen Zhang

The design of effective online caching policies is an increasingly important problem for content distribution networks, online social networks and edge computing services, among other areas. This paper proposes a new algorithmic toolbox for…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Naram Mhaisen , George Iosifidis , Douglas Leith

We address the problem of learning in an online, bandit setting where the learner must repeatedly select among $K$ actions, but only receives partial feedback based on its choices. We establish two new facts: First, using a new algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-10-28 Alina Beygelzimer , John Langford , Lihong Li , Lev Reyzin , Robert E. Schapire

Contextual bandit learning is a reinforcement learning problem where the learner repeatedly receives a set of features (context), takes an action and receives a reward based on the action and context. We consider this problem under a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-05 Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudík , Satyen Kale , John Langford , Robert E. Schapire

We consider the problem of adversarial (non-stochastic) online learning with partial information feedback, where at each round, a decision maker selects an action from a finite set of alternatives. We develop a black-box approach for such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-28 Thodoris Lykouris , Karthik Sridharan , Eva Tardos

Sequential prediction problems such as imitation learning, where future observations depend on previous predictions (actions), violate the common i.i.d. assumptions made in statistical learning. This leads to poor performance in theory and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-17 Stephane Ross , Geoffrey J. Gordon , J. Andrew Bagnell

The literature on bandit learning and regret analysis has focused on contexts where the goal is to converge on an optimal action in a manner that limits exploration costs. One shortcoming imposed by this orientation is that it does not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-01 Daniel Russo , David Tse , Benjamin Van Roy

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

Past research on interactive decision making problems (bandits, reinforcement learning, etc.) mostly focuses on the minimax regret that measures the algorithm's performance on the hardest instance. However, an ideal algorithm should adapt…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Kefan Dong , Tengyu Ma

Motivated by the pressing need for efficient optimization in online recommender systems, we revisit the cascading bandit model proposed by Kveton et al. (2015). While Thompson sampling (TS) algorithms have been shown to be empirically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Zixin Zhong , Wang Chi Cheung , Vincent Y. F. Tan

In the contextual linear bandit setting, algorithms built on the optimism principle fail to exploit the structure of the problem and have been shown to be asymptotically suboptimal. In this paper, we follow recent approaches of deriving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-23 Andrea Tirinzoni , Matteo Pirotta , Marcello Restelli , Alessandro Lazaric

We propose a framework which generalizes "decision making with structured observations" by allowing robust (i.e. multivalued) models. In this framework, each model associates each decision with a convex set of probability distributions over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Alexander Appel , Vanessa Kosoy