Related papers: Cramming Contextual Bandits for On-policy Statisti…
We study policy evaluation of offline contextual bandits subject to unobserved confounders. Sensitivity analysis methods are commonly used to estimate the policy value under the worst-case confounding over a given uncertainty set. However,…
What is the most statistically efficient way to do off-policy evaluation and optimization with batch data from bandit feedback? For log data generated by contextual bandit algorithms, we consider offline estimators for the expected reward…
Contextual bandit algorithms often estimate reward models to inform decision-making. However, true rewards can contain action-independent redundancies that are not relevant for decision-making. We show it is more data-efficient to estimate…
Even when unable to run experiments, practitioners can evaluate prospective policies, using previously logged data. However, while the bandits literature has adopted a diverse set of objectives, most research on off-policy evaluation to…
We consider the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in contextual bandits, where the goal is to estimate the value of a target policy using the data collected by a logging policy. Most popular approaches to the OPE are variants of the…
The statistical framework of Generalized Linear Models (GLM) can be applied to sequential problems involving categorical or ordinal rewards associated, for instance, with clicks, likes or ratings. In the example of binary rewards, logistic…
Contextual linear optimization (CLO) uses predictive contextual features to reduce uncertainty in random cost coefficients in the objective and thereby improve decision-making performance. A canonical example is the stochastic shortest path…
Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits is a well-known and accepted online optimization algorithm, that is used in many Web experiences to tailor content or presentation to users' traffic. Much has been published on theoretical guarantees (e.g.…
Recent advances in contextual bandit optimization and reinforcement learning have garnered interest in applying these methods to real-world sequential decision making problems. Real-world applications frequently have constraints with…
This paper presents a concise review of Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit (CMAB) methods and introduces an experimental framework for scalable, interpretable offer selection, addressing the challenge of fast-changing offers. The approach models…
Online decision-making problem requires us to make a sequence of decisions based on incremental information. Common solutions often need to learn a reward model of different actions given the contextual information and then maximize the…
A key goal in stochastic contextual linear bandits is to efficiently learn a near-optimal policy. Prior algorithms for this problem learn a policy by strategically sampling actions but naively (passively) sampling contexts from the…
We consider the contextual bandit problem, where a player sequentially makes decisions based on past observations to maximize the cumulative reward. Although many algorithms have been proposed for contextual bandit, most of them rely on…
In production systems, contextual bandit approaches often rely on direct reward models that take both action and context as input. However, these models can suffer from confounding, making it difficult to isolate the effect of the action…
We propose feature perturbation, a simple yet effective exploration strategy for contextual bandits that injects randomness directly into feature inputs, instead of randomizing unknown parameters or adding noise to rewards. Remarkably, this…
Taking advantage of contextual information can potentially boost the performance of recommender systems. In the era of big data, such side information often has several dimensions. Thus, developing decision-making algorithms to cope with…
Offline policy learning (OPL) leverages existing data collected a priori for policy optimization without any active exploration. Despite the prevalence and recent interest in this problem, its theoretical and algorithmic foundations in…
Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…
We study risk-aware offline policy learning, aiming to learn a decision rule from logged data that is optimal under general risk criteria. This problem is crucial in high-stakes domains where online interaction is infeasible and adverse…
Bandit algorithms are increasingly used in real-world sequential decision-making problems. Associated with this is an increased desire to be able to use the resulting datasets to answer scientific questions like: Did one type of ad lead to…