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In this paper, we present refined probabilistic bounds on empirical reward estimates for off-policy learning in bandit problems. We build on the PAC-Bayesian bounds from Seldin et al. (2010) and improve on their results using a new…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-18 Amaury Gouverneur , Tobias J. Oechtering , Mikael Skoglund

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-24 Yoan Russac , Olivier Cappé , Aurélien Garivier

Many works have developed no-regret algorithms for contextual bandits with function approximation, where the mean reward function over context-action pairs belongs to a function class. Although there are many approaches to this problem, one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Aldo Pacchiano

We consider model selection in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. Given a set of base learning algorithms, an effective model selection strategy adapts to the best learning algorithm in an online fashion. We show that by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Aldo Pacchiano , My Phan

We consider the problem of contextual bandits with stochastic experts, which is a variation of the traditional stochastic contextual bandit with experts problem. In our problem setting, we assume access to a class of stochastic experts,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-04 Rajat Sen , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Nihal Sharma , Sanjay Shakkottai

In this paper, we consider the contextual variant of the MNL-Bandit problem. More specifically, we consider a dynamic set optimization problem, where a decision-maker offers a subset (assortment) of products to a consumer and observes the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Priyank Agrawal , Theja Tulabandhula , Vashist Avadhanula

We address the problem of regret minimization in logistic contextual bandits, where a learner decides among sequential actions or arms given their respective contexts to maximize binary rewards. Using a fast inference procedure with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-22 Bianca Dumitrascu , Karen Feng , Barbara E Engelhardt

Accurately evaluating new policies (e.g. ad-placement models, ranking functions, recommendation functions) is one of the key prerequisites for improving interactive systems. While the conventional approach to evaluation relies on online A/B…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-27 Aman Agarwal , Soumya Basu , Tobias Schnabel , Thorsten Joachims

Contextual multi-armed bandit is a fundamental learning framework for making a sequence of decisions, e.g., advertising recommendations for a sequence of arriving users. Recent works have shown that clustering these users based on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Jingyuan Liu , Zeyu Zhang , Xuchuang Wang , Xutong Liu , John C. S. Lui , Mohammad Hajiesmaili , Carlee Joe-Wong

Prompting has emerged as the dominant paradigm for adapting large, pre-trained transformer-based models to downstream tasks. The Prompting Decision Transformer (PDT) enables large-scale, multi-task offline Reinforcement Learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Finn Rietz , Oleg Smirnov , Sara Karimi , Lele Cao

We study the Logistic Contextual Slate Bandit problem, where, at each round, an agent selects a slate of $N$ items from an exponentially large set (of size $2^{\Omega(N)}$) of candidate slates provided by the environment. A single binary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Tanmay Goyal , Gaurav Sinha

We study sequential decision making in environments where rewards are only partially observed, but can be modeled as a function of observed contexts and the chosen action by the decision maker. This setting, known as contextual bandits,…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-03-11 Miroslav Dudík , Dumitru Erhan , John Langford , Lihong Li

We present a family $\{\hat{\pi}\}_{p\ge 1}$ of pessimistic learning rules for offline learning of linear contextual bandits, relying on confidence sets with respect to different $\ell_p$ norms, where $\hat{\pi}_2$ corresponds to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Gene Li , Cong Ma , Nathan Srebro

The design and performance analysis of bandit algorithms in the presence of stage-wise safety or reliability constraints has recently garnered significant interest. In this work, we consider the linear stochastic bandit problem under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Ahmadreza Moradipari , Sanae Amani , Mahnoosh Alizadeh , Christos Thrampoulidis

We study the problem of incentive-compatible online learning with bandit feedback. In this class of problems, the experts are self-interested agents who might misrepresent their preferences with the goal of being selected most often. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-13 Julian Zimmert , Teodor V. Marinov

We design and implement an adaptive experiment (a ``contextual bandit'') to learn a targeted treatment assignment policy, where the goal is to use a participant's survey responses to determine which charity to expose them to in a donation…

We study online learning in constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) in which rewards and constraints may be either stochastic or adversarial. In such settings, Stradi et al.(2024) proposed the first best-of-both-worlds algorithm able…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Francesco Emanuele Stradi , Anna Lunghi , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

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 consider a bandit problem which involves sequential sampling from two populations (arms). Each arm produces a noisy reward realization which depends on an observable random covariate. The goal is to maximize cumulative expected reward.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2010-03-09 Philippe Rigollet , Assaf Zeevi

We study stochastic linear optimization problem with bandit feedback. The set of arms take values in an $N$-dimensional space and belong to a bounded polyhedron described by finitely many linear inequalities. We provide a lower bound for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-09-29 Manjesh K. Hanawal , Amir Leshem , Venkatesh Saligrama