Related papers: DISCO: An End-to-End Bandit Framework for Personal…
Coordinate descent methods usually minimize a cost function by updating a random decision variable (corresponding to one coordinate) at a time. Ideally, we would update the decision variable that yields the largest decrease in the cost…
Many real-world bandit applications are characterized by sparse rewards, which can significantly hinder learning efficiency. Leveraging problem-specific structures for careful distribution modeling is recognized as essential for improving…
We present a new algorithm ASEBO for optimizing high-dimensional blackbox functions. ASEBO adapts to the geometry of the function and learns optimal sets of sensing directions, which are used to probe it, on-the-fly. It addresses the…
A contextual bandit problem is studied in a highly non-stationary environment, which is ubiquitous in various recommender systems due to the time-varying interests of users. Two models with disjoint and hybrid payoffs are considered to…
Bandit based optimisation has a remarkable advantage over gradient based approaches due to their global perspective, which eliminates the danger of getting stuck at local optima. However, for continuous optimisation problems or problems…
Often, recommendation systems employ continuous training, leading to a self-feedback loop bias in which the system becomes biased toward its previous recommendations. Recent studies have attempted to mitigate this bias by collecting small…
Thompson Sampling (TS) is one of the most effective algorithms for solving contextual multi-armed bandit problems. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, called Neural Thompson Sampling, which adapts deep neural networks for both…
As cellular networks become denser, a scalable and dynamic tuning of wireless base station parameters can only be achieved through automated optimization. Although the contextual bandit framework arises as a natural candidate for such a…
In this paper, we study Contextual Unsupervised Sequential Selection (USS), a new variant of the stochastic contextual bandits problem where the loss of an arm cannot be inferred from the observed feedback. In our setup, arms are associated…
Contextual bandits are a form of multi-armed bandit in which the agent has access to predictive side information (known as the context) for each arm at each time step, and have been used to model personalized news recommendation, ad…
In many biomedical, science, and engineering problems, one must sequentially decide which action to take next so as to maximize rewards. One general class of algorithms for optimizing interactions with the world, while simultaneously…
We consider a novel formulation of the dynamic pricing and demand learning problem, where the evolution of demand in response to posted prices is governed by a stochastic variant of the popular Bass model with parameters $\alpha, \beta$…
Offline contextual bandits allow one to learn policies from historical/offline data without requiring online interaction. However, offline policy optimization that maximizes overall expected rewards can unintentionally amplify the reward…
The bandit paradigm provides a unified modeling framework for problems that require decision-making under uncertainty. Because many business metrics can be viewed as rewards (a.k.a. utilities) that result from actions, bandit algorithms…
Bandit Convex Optimisation (BCO) is a powerful framework for sequential decision-making in non-stationary and partially observable environments. In a BCO problem, a decision-maker sequentially picks actions to minimize the cumulative cost…
We propose a novel computational framework that models human social decision-making under uncertainty as an integrated Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) and Markov Decision Process (MDP) optimization problem, in which agents adaptively balance the…
Embedding models, which learn latent representations of users and items based on user-item interaction patterns, are a key component of recommendation systems. In many applications, contextual constraints need to be applied to refine…
We propose ${\tt AdaTS}$, a Thompson sampling algorithm that adapts sequentially to bandit tasks that it interacts with. The key idea in ${\tt AdaTS}$ is to adapt to an unknown task prior distribution by maintaining a distribution over its…
A challenging aspect of the bandit problem is that a stochastic reward is observed only for the chosen arm and the rewards of other arms remain missing. The dependence of the arm choice on the past context and reward pairs compounds the…
To acquire a new skill, humans learn better and faster if a tutor, based on their current knowledge level, informs them of how much attention they should pay to particular content or practice problems. Similarly, a machine learning model…