Related papers: Batched Nonparametric Contextual Bandits
We study a nonparametric contextual bandit problem where the expected reward functions belong to a H\"older class with smoothness parameter $\beta$. We show how this interpolates between two extremes that were previously studied in…
In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective…
Most contextual bandit algorithms minimize regret against the best fixed policy, a questionable benchmark for non-stationary environments that are ubiquitous in applications. In this work, we develop several efficient contextual bandit…
Bandits with covariates, a.k.a. contextual bandits, address situations where optimal actions (or arms) at a given time $t$, depend on a context $x_t$, e.g., a new patient's medical history, a consumer's past purchases. While it is…
Contextual bandits are a central framework for sequential decision-making, with applications ranging from recommendation systems to clinical trials. While nonparametric methods can flexibly model complex reward structures, they suffer from…
We study the problem of stochastic contextual bandits in the agnostic setting, where the goal is to compete with the best policy in a given class without assuming realizability or imposing model restrictions on losses or rewards. In this…
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…
We study the benefits of sparsity in nonparametric contextual bandit problems, in which the set of candidate features is countably or uncountably infinite. Our contribution is two-fold. First, using a novel reduction to sequences of…
We consider the problem of contextual bandits where actions are subsets of a ground set and mean rewards are modeled by an unknown monotone submodular function that belongs to a class $\mathcal{F}$. We allow time-varying matroid constraints…
Contextual bandits are a rich model for sequential decision making given side information, with important applications, e.g., in recommender systems. We propose novel algorithms for contextual bandits harnessing neural networks to…
Nonparametric contextual bandit is an important model of sequential decision making problems. Under $\alpha$-Tsybakov margin condition, existing research has established a regret bound of $\tilde{O}\left(T^{1-\frac{\alpha+1}{d+2}}\right)$…
We consider the problem of contextual bandits and imitation learning, where the learner lacks direct knowledge of the executed action's reward. Instead, the learner can actively query an expert at each round to compare two actions and…
Motivated by a range of applications, we study in this paper the problem of transfer learning for nonparametric contextual multi-armed bandits under the covariate shift model, where we have data collected on source bandits before the start…
In this paper, we address the stochastic contextual linear bandit problem, where a decision maker is provided a context (a random set of actions drawn from a distribution). The expected reward of each action is specified by the inner…
We study sequential decision-making in batched nonparametric contextual bandits, where actions are selected over a finite horizon divided into a small number of batches. Motivated by constraints in domains such as medicine and marketing --…
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.…
Motivated by applications in online bidding and sleeping bandits, we examine the problem of contextual bandits with cross learning, where the learner observes the loss associated with the action across all possible contexts, not just the…
This paper studies semiparametric contextual bandits, a generalization of the linear stochastic bandit problem where the reward for an action is modeled as a linear function of known action features confounded by an non-linear…
Contextual bandits are canonical models for sequential decision-making under uncertainty in environments with time-varying components. In this setting, the expected reward of each bandit arm consists of the inner product of an unknown…
In this paper we initiate a study of non parametric contextual bandits under shape constraints on the mean reward function. Specifically, we study a setting where the context is one dimensional, and the mean reward function is isotonic with…