Related papers: Logarithmic Smoothing for Pessimistic Off-Policy E…
This paper considers stochastic bandits with side observations, a model that accounts for both the exploration/exploitation dilemma and relationships between arms. In this setting, after pulling an arm i, the decision maker also observes…
We consider the problem of controlling a known linear dynamical system under stochastic noise, adversarially chosen costs, and bandit feedback. Unlike the full feedback setting where the entire cost function is revealed after each decision,…
We introduce data-driven decision-making algorithms that achieve state-of-the-art \emph{dynamic regret} bounds for non-stationary bandit settings. These settings capture applications such as advertisement allocation, dynamic pricing, and…
This paper investigates regret minimization, statistical inference, and their interplay in high-dimensional online decision-making based on the sparse linear context bandit model. We integrate the $\varepsilon$-greedy bandit algorithm for…
We explore off-policy evaluation and learning (OPE/L) in contextual combinatorial bandits (CCB), where a policy selects a subset in the action space. For example, it might choose a set of furniture pieces (a bed and a drawer) from available…
Offline (or batch) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms seek to learn an optimal policy from a fixed dataset without active data collection. Based on the composition of the offline dataset, two main categories of methods are used:…
We consider a version of the continuum armed bandit where an action induces a filtered realisation of a non-homogeneous Poisson process. Point data in the filtered sample are then revealed to the decision-maker, whose reward is the total…
We study how to adapt to smoothly-varying ('easy') environments in well-known online learning problems where acquiring information is expensive. For the problem of label efficient prediction, which is a budgeted version of prediction with…
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…
Excessively changing policies in many real world scenarios is difficult, unethical, or expensive. After all, doctor guidelines, tax codes, and price lists can only be reprinted so often. We may thus want to only change a policy when it is…
This paper proposes a linear bandit algorithm that is adaptive to environments at two different levels of hierarchy. At the higher level, the proposed algorithm adapts to a variety of types of environments. More precisely, it achieves…
Many important optimization problems, such as the minimum spanning tree and minimum-cost flow, can be solved optimally by a greedy method. In this work, we study a learning variant of these problems, where the model of the problem is…
Due to the drastic gap in complexity between sequential and batch statistical learning, recent work has studied a smoothed sequential learning setting, where Nature is constrained to select contexts with density bounded by 1/{\sigma} with…
We consider the linear contextual multi-class multi-period packing problem (LMMP) where the goal is to pack items such that the total vector of consumption is below a given budget vector and the total value is as large as possible. We…
Thompson Sampling has been widely used for contextual bandit problems due to the flexibility of its modeling power. However, a general theory for this class of methods in the frequentist setting is still lacking. In this paper, we present a…
We consider the stochastic linear (multi-armed) contextual bandit problem with the possibility of hidden simple multi-armed bandit structure in which the rewards are independent of the contextual information. Algorithms that are designed…
This paper addresses the problem of learning to sparsify stochastic linear bandits, where a decision-maker sequentially selects actions from a high-dimensional space subject to a sparsity constraint on the number of nonzero elements in the…
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…
Restless bandit problems are instances of non-stationary multi-armed bandits. These problems have been studied well from the optimization perspective, where the goal is to efficiently find a near-optimal policy when system parameters are…
We consider (stochastic) softmax policy gradient (PG) methods for bandits and tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs). While the PG objective is non-concave, recent research has used the objective's smoothness and gradient domination…