Related papers: DISCO: An End-to-End Bandit Framework for Personal…
This thesis aims to study some of the mathematical challenges that arise in the analysis of statistical sequential decision-making algorithms for postoperative patients follow-up. Stochastic bandits (multiarmed, contextual) model the…
Contextual Bandits find important use cases in various real-life scenarios such as online advertising, recommendation systems, healthcare, etc. However, most of the algorithms use flat feature vectors to represent context whereas, in the…
In this paper, we introduce and analyze a variant of the Thompson sampling (TS) algorithm for contextual bandits. At each round, traditional TS requires samples from the current posterior distribution, which is usually intractable. To…
In this work, we initiate the idea of using denoising diffusion models to learn priors for online decision making problems. Our special focus is on the meta-learning for bandit framework, with the goal of learning a strategy that performs…
Exposure bias is a well-known issue in recommender systems where items and suppliers are not equally represented in the recommendation results. This is especially problematic when bias is amplified over time as a few popular items are…
A major research direction in contextual bandits is to develop algorithms that are computationally efficient, yet support flexible, general-purpose function approximation. Algorithms based on modeling rewards have shown strong empirical…
Global optimization of black-box functions is challenging in high dimensions. We introduce a conceptual adaptive random search framework, Branching Adaptive Surrogate Search Optimization (BASSO), that combines partitioning and surrogate…
On E-commerce stores, there are rich recommendation content to help shoppers shopping more efficiently. However given numerous products, it's crucial to select most relevant content to reduce the burden of information overload. We…
In this short paper, we present early insights from a Decision Support System for Customer Support Agents (CSAs) serving customers of a leading accounting software. The system is under development and is designed to provide suggestions to…
Recently, self-learning methods based on user satisfaction metrics and contextual bandits have shown promising results to enable consistent improvements in conversational AI systems. However, directly targeting such metrics by off-policy…
Learning effective contextual-bandit policies from past actions of a deployed system is highly desirable in many settings (e.g. voice assistants, recommendation, search), since it enables the reuse of large amounts of log data.…
Stochastic multi-armed bandits form a class of online learning problems that have important applications in online recommendation systems, adaptive medical treatment, and many others. Even though potential attacks against these learning…
In this paper, we revisit the regret minimization problem in sparse stochastic contextual linear bandits, where feature vectors may be of large dimension $d$, but where the reward function depends on a few, say $s_0\ll d$, of these features…
This work explores adaptations of successful multi-armed bandits policies to the online contextual bandits scenario with binary rewards using binary classification algorithms such as logistic regression as black-box oracles. Some of these…
When an Agent visits a platform recommending a menu of content to select from, their choice of item depends not only on fixed preferences, but also on their prior engagements with the platform. The Recommender's primary objective is…
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has proven effective in complex reasoning tasks like math word problems and code generation. However, when applied to Text-to-SQL datasets, it often fails to improve performance and can even degrade it.…
We propose and investigate a class of new algorithms for sequential decision making that interacts with \textit{a batch of users} simultaneously instead of \textit{a user} at each decision epoch. This type of batch models is motivated by…
Online learning in large-scale structured bandits is known to be challenging due to the curse of dimensionality. In this paper, we propose a unified meta-learning framework for a general class of structured bandit problems where the…
Stochastic high dimensional bandit problems with low dimensional structures are useful in different applications such as online advertising and drug discovery. In this work, we propose a simple unified algorithm for such problems and…
Multi-dimensional online decision making plays a crucial role in many real applications such as online recommendation and digital marketing. In these problems, a decision at each time is a combination of choices from different types of…