English
Related papers

Related papers: Causal Bandits with General Causal Models and Inte…

200 papers

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Dean P. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin

We study the causal bandit problem that entails identifying a near-optimal intervention from a specified set $A$ of (possibly non-atomic) interventions over a given causal graph. Here, an optimal intervention in ${A}$ is one that maximizes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Ayush Sawarni , Rahul Madhavan , Gaurav Sinha , Siddharth Barman

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-01 Parnian Kassraie , Andreas Krause

This paper presents a finite-time analysis of the KL-UCB algorithm, an online, horizon-free index policy for stochastic bandit problems. We prove two distinct results: first, for arbitrary bounded rewards, the KL-UCB algorithm satisfies a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-08-30 Aurélien Garivier , Olivier Cappé

We study the contextual continuum bandits problem, where the learner sequentially receives a side information vector and has to choose an action in a convex set, minimizing a function associated with the context. The goal is to minimize all…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-28 Arya Akhavan , Karim Lounici , Massimiliano Pontil , Alexandre B. Tsybakov

This paper investigates stochastic multi-armed bandit algorithms that are robust to adversarial attacks, where an attacker can first observe the learner's action and {then} alter their reward observation. We study two cases of this model,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Xuchuang Wang , Jinhang Zuo , Xutong Liu , John C. S. Lui , Mohammad Hajiesmaili

We study the causal bandit problem when the causal graph is unknown and develop an efficient algorithm for finding the parent node of the reward node using atomic interventions. We derive the exact equation for the expected number of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-09 Mikhail Konobeev , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash

We consider stochastic multi-armed bandit problems where the expected reward is a Lipschitz function of the arm, and where the set of arms is either discrete or continuous. For discrete Lipschitz bandits, we derive asymptotic problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-05-20 Stefan Magureanu , Richard Combes , Alexandre Proutiere

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

In this paper, the causal bandit problem is investigated, with the objective of maximizing the long-term reward by selecting an optimal sequence of interventions on nodes in an unknown causal graph. It is assumed that both the causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Chen Peng , Di Zhang , Urbashi Mitra

We consider the combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) problem, where the reward function is nonlinear. In this setting, the agent chooses a batch of arms on each round and receives feedback from each arm of the batch. The reward that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Nadav Merlis , Shie Mannor

We study the problem of using causal models to improve the rate at which good interventions can be learned online in a stochastic environment. Our formalism combines multi-arm bandits and causal inference to model a novel type of bandit…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-13 Finnian Lattimore , Tor Lattimore , Mark D. Reid

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

Causal knowledge can be used to support decision-making problems. This has been recognized in the causal bandits literature, where a causal (multi-armed) bandit is characterized by a causal graphical model and a target variable. The arms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Francisco N. F. Q. Simoes , Itai Feigenbaum , Mehdi Dastani , Thijs van Ommen

Cascading bandit (CB) is a popular model for web search and online advertising, where an agent aims to learn the $K$ most attractive items out of a ground set of size $L$ during the interaction with a user. However, the stationary CB model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-18 Lingda Wang , Huozhi Zhou , Bingcong Li , Lav R. Varshney , Zhizhen Zhao

In this paper, we study the stochastic combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) framework that allows a general nonlinear reward function, whose expected value may not depend only on the means of the input random variables but possibly on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-23 Wei Chen , Wei Hu , Fu Li , Jian Li , Yu Liu , Pinyan Lu

We study a collaborative multi-agent stochastic linear bandit setting, where $N$ agents that form a network communicate locally to minimize their overall regret. In this setting, each agent has its own linear bandit problem (its own reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-16 Ahmadreza Moradipari , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Mahnoosh Alizadeh

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Ruohan Zhan , Susan Athey , Emma Brunskill

Thanks to the power of representation learning, neural contextual bandit algorithms demonstrate remarkable performance improvement against their classical counterparts. But because their exploration has to be performed in the entire neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Yiling Jia , Weitong Zhang , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu , Hongning Wang

We study the $\textit{single-index bandit}$ problem, where rewards depend on an unknown one-dimensional projection of high-dimensional contexts through an unknown reward function. This model extends linear and generalized linear bandits to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-12 Devdan Dey , Sujoy Bhore , Avishek Ghosh