Related papers: Strategic Linear Contextual Bandits
Motivated by modern applications, such as online advertisement and recommender systems, we study the top-$k$ extreme contextual bandits problem, where the total number of arms can be enormous, and the learner is allowed to select $k$ arms…
This paper studies the adversarial graphical contextual bandits, a variant of adversarial multi-armed bandits that leverage two categories of the most common side information: \emph{contexts} and \emph{side observations}. In this setting, a…
The Greedy algorithm is the simplest heuristic in sequential decision problem that carelessly takes the locally optimal choice at each round, disregarding any advantages of exploring and/or information gathering. Theoretically, it is known…
We consider a novel variant of the contextual bandit problem (i.e., the multi-armed bandit with side-information, or context, available to a decision-maker) where the context used at each decision may be corrupted ("useless context"). This…
Conservative Contextual Bandits (CCBs) address safety in sequential decision making by requiring that an agent's policy, along with minimizing regret, also satisfies a safety constraint: the performance is not worse than a baseline policy…
Motivated by online recommendation and advertising systems, we consider a causal model for stochastic contextual bandits with a latent low-dimensional confounder. In our model, there are $L$ observed contexts and $K$ arms of the bandit. The…
Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the strategy deployed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. Further, often we have only partial information on the state of the system. We study the…
Dueling bandits is a prominent framework for decision-making involving preferential feedback, a valuable feature that fits various applications involving human interaction, such as ranking, information retrieval, and recommendation systems.…
Multi-armed bandits (MAB) model sequential decision making problems, in which a learner sequentially chooses arms with unknown reward distributions in order to maximize its cumulative reward. Most of the prior work on MAB assumes that the…
We study contextual bandits in the presence of a stage-wise constraint when the constraint must be satisfied both with high probability and in expectation. We start with the linear case where both the reward function and the stage-wise…
We consider a resource-aware variant of the classical multi-armed bandit problem: In each round, the learner selects an arm and determines a resource limit. It then observes a corresponding (random) reward, provided the (random) amount of…
We introduce a novel extension of the canonical multi-armed bandit problem that incorporates an additional strategic innovation: abstention. In this enhanced framework, the agent is not only tasked with selecting an arm at each time step,…
This paper addresses the critical challenge of stochastic latent heterogeneity in online decision-making, where individuals' responses to actions vary not only with observable contexts but also with unobserved, randomly realized subgroups.…
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…
We consider a multi-agent multi-armed bandit setting in which $n$ honest agents collaborate over a network to minimize regret but $m$ malicious agents can disrupt learning arbitrarily. Assuming the network is the complete graph, existing…
We consider the regret minimization task in a dueling bandits problem with context information. In every round of the sequential decision problem, the learner makes a context-dependent selection of two choice alternatives (arms) to be…
In this paper, we investigate the impact of context diversity on stochastic linear contextual bandits. As opposed to the previous view that contexts lead to more difficult bandit learning, we show that when the contexts are sufficiently…
In many online learning or multi-armed bandit problems, the taken actions or pulled arms are ordinal and required to be monotone over time. Examples include dynamic pricing, in which the firms use markup pricing policies to please early…
We initiate the study of a repeated principal-agent problem over a finite horizon $T$, where a principal sequentially interacts with $K\geq 2$ types of agents arriving in an adversarial order. At each round, the principal strategically…
We study bandit model selection in stochastic environments. Our approach relies on a meta-algorithm that selects between candidate base algorithms. We develop a meta-algorithm-base algorithm abstraction that can work with general classes of…