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We study pure exploration in bandits, where the dimension of the feature representation can be much larger than the number of arms. To overcome the curse of dimensionality, we propose to adaptively embed the feature representation of each…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-18 Yinglun Zhu , Dongruo Zhou , Ruoxi Jiang , Quanquan Gu , Rebecca Willett , Robert Nowak

Contextual bandits often provide simple and effective personalization in decision making problems, making them popular tools to deliver personalized interventions in mobile health as well as other health applications. However, when bandits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-28 Jiayu Yao , Emma Brunskill , Weiwei Pan , Susan Murphy , Finale Doshi-Velez

Behaviour Change Techniques (BCTs) are central to digital health interventions, yet selecting and delivering effective techniques remains challenging. Contextual bandits enable statistically grounded optimisation of BCT selection, while…

We propose the first fully-adaptive algorithm for pure exploration in linear bandits---the task to find the arm with the largest expected reward, which depends on an unknown parameter linearly. While existing methods partially or entirely…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-10-17 Liyuan Xu , Junya Honda , Masashi Sugiyama

Contextual bandits are widely used in industrial personalization systems. These online learning frameworks learn a treatment assignment policy in the presence of treatment effects that vary with the observed contextual features of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-11 Claudia Roberts , Maria Dimakopoulou , Qifeng Qiao , Ashok Chandrashekhar , Tony Jebara

The deployment of Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) has become commonplace in many economic applications. However, regret guarantees for even state-of-the-art linear bandit algorithms (such as Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty Linear bandit…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-02-28 Jingwen Zhang , Yifang Chen , Amandeep Singh

We introduce a novel algorithmic approach to content recommendation based on adaptive clustering of exploration-exploitation ("bandit") strategies. We provide a sharp regret analysis of this algorithm in a standard stochastic noise setting,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-06-09 Claudio Gentile , Shuai Li , Giovanni Zappella

This paper presents AdaptEx, a self-service contextual bandit platform widely used at Expedia Group, that leverages multi-armed bandit algorithms to personalize user experiences at scale. AdaptEx considers the unique context of each visitor…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-09-18 William Black , Ercument Ilhan , Andrea Marchini , Vilda Markeviciute

In this research, we investigate the high-dimensional linear contextual bandit problem where the number of features $p$ is greater than the budget $T$, or it may even be infinite. Differing from the majority of previous works in this field,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-27 Junpei Komiyama , Masaaki Imaizumi

Speculative decoding is widely used in accelerating large language model (LLM) inference. In this work, we focus on the online draft model selection problem in speculative decoding. We design an algorithm that provably competes with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Hongyi Liu , Jiaji Huang , Zhen Jia , Youngsuk Park , Yu-Xiang Wang

We consider the stochastic contextual bandit problem under the high dimensional linear model. We focus on the case where the action space is finite and random, with each action associated with a randomly generated contextual covariate. This…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-07 Yining Wang , Yi Chen , Ethan X. Fang , Zhaoran Wang , Runze Li

We study batched bandit experiments and consider the problem of inference conditional on the realized stopping time, assignment probabilities, and target parameter, where all of these may be chosen adaptively using information up to the…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-21 Jiafeng Chen , Isaiah Andrews

Indirect experiments provide a valuable framework for estimating treatment effects in situations where conducting randomized control trials (RCTs) is impractical or unethical. Unlike RCTs, indirect experiments estimate treatment effects by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Yash Chandak , Shiv Shankar , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Emma Brunskill

Motivated by online decision-making in time-varying combinatorial environments, we study the problem of transforming offline algorithms to their online counterparts. We focus on offline combinatorial problems that are amenable to a constant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Rad Niazadeh , Negin Golrezaei , Joshua Wang , Fransisca Susan , Ashwinkumar Badanidiyuru

Stochastic linear bandits are a natural and well-studied model for structured exploration/exploitation problems and are widely used in applications such as online marketing and recommendation. One of the main challenges faced by…

Contextual bandit algorithms have become popular for online recommendation systems such as Digg, Yahoo! Buzz, and news recommendation in general. \emph{Offline} evaluation of the effectiveness of new algorithms in these applications is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-13 Lihong Li , Wei Chu , John Langford , Xuanhui Wang

We consider the contextual bandit problem where at each time, the agent only has access to a noisy version of the context and the error variance (or an estimator of this variance). This setting is motivated by a wide range of applications…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-19 Yongyi Guo , Ziping Xu , Susan Murphy

Data that is gathered adaptively --- via bandit algorithms, for example --- exhibits bias. This is true both when gathering simple numeric valued data --- the empirical means kept track of by stochastic bandit algorithms are biased…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-07 Seth Neel , Aaron Roth

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit diverse response behaviors, costs, and strengths, making it challenging to select the most suitable LLM for a given user query. We study the problem of adaptive multi-LLM selection in an online setting,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Manhin Poon , XiangXiang Dai , Xutong Liu , Fang Kong , John C. S. Lui , Jinhang Zuo

Motivated by practical needs such as large-scale learning, we study the impact of adaptivity constraints to linear contextual bandits, a central problem in online active learning. We consider two popular limited adaptivity models in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-26 Yufei Ruan , Jiaqi Yang , Yuan Zhou