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Sequential decision-making algorithms such as multi-armed bandits can find optimal personalized decisions, but are notoriously sample-hungry. In personalized medicine, for example, training a bandit from scratch for every patient is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Ahmet Zahid Balcıoğlu , Newton Mwai , Emil Carlsson , Fredrik D. Johansson

Speculative decoding has emerged as a popular method to accelerate the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) while retaining their superior text generation performance. Previous methods either adopt a fixed speculative decoding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Yunlong Hou , Fengzhuo Zhang , Cunxiao Du , Xuan Zhang , Jiachun Pan , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Vincent Y. F. Tan , Zhuoran Yang

Continuously learning and leveraging the knowledge accumulated from prior tasks in order to improve future performance is a long standing machine learning problem. In this paper, we study the problem in the multi-armed bandit framework with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-29 Matthieu Jedor , Jonathan Louëdec , Vianney Perchet

We consider the problem of contextual bandits and imitation learning, where the learner lacks direct knowledge of the executed action's reward. Instead, the learner can actively query an expert at each round to compare two actions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan , Wen Sun , Runzhe Wu

Contextual multi-armed bandits are a popular choice to model sequential decision-making. E.g., in a healthcare application we may perform various tests to asses a patient condition (exploration) and then decide on the best treatment to give…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Mirco Mutti , Jeongyeol Kwon , Shie Mannor , Aviv Tamar

In the dynamic landscape of online businesses, recommender systems are pivotal in enhancing user experiences. While traditional approaches have relied on static supervised learning, the quest for adaptive, user-centric recommendations has…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-12-22 Yikun Ban , Yunzhe Qi , Jingrui He

Multi-armed bandit algorithms have become a reference solution for handling the explore/exploit dilemma in recommender systems, and many other important real-world problems, such as display advertisement. However, such algorithms usually…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-25 Qingyun Wu , Naveen Iyer , Hongning Wang

We introduce a unified framework that seamlessly integrates algorithmic recourse, contextual bandits, and large language models (LLMs) to support sequential decision-making in high-stakes settings such as personalized medicine. We first…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Junyu Cao , Ruijiang Gao , Esmaeil Keyvanshokooh , Jianhao Ma

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Xiao Xu , Fang Dong , Yanghua Li , Shaojian He , Xin Li

Contextual bandit algorithms suffer from high regret during cold-start, when the learner has insufficient data to distinguish good arms from bad. We propose augmenting Disjoint LinUCB with LLM pseudo-observations: after each round, a large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Maksim Pershin , Ivan Golovanov , Pavel Baltabaev , Natalia Trankova

We consider a sequential assortment selection problem where the user choice is given by a multinomial logit (MNL) choice model whose parameters are unknown. In each period, the learning agent observes a $d$-dimensional contextual…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-26 Min-hwan Oh , Garud Iyengar

In stochastic contextual bandits, an agent sequentially makes actions from a time-dependent action set based on past experience to minimize the cumulative regret. Like many other machine learning algorithms, the performance of bandits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Yue Kang , Cho-Jui Hsieh , Thomas C. M. Lee

Contextual bandits with linear payoffs, which are also known as linear bandits, provide a powerful alternative for solving practical problems of sequential decisions, e.g., online advertisements. In the era of big data, contextual data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-21 Xiaotian Yu

Contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms have been shown promising for maximizing cumulative rewards in sequential decision tasks such as news article recommendation systems, web page ad placement algorithms, and mobile health.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-01 Gi-Soo Kim , Myunghee Cho Paik

A central problem in sequential decision making is to develop algorithms that are practical and computationally efficient, yet support the use of flexible, general-purpose models. Focusing on the contextual bandit problem, recent progress…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Yinglun Zhu , Dylan J. Foster , John Langford , Paul Mineiro

In machine learning, the notion of multi-armed bandits refers to a class of online learning problems, in which an agent is supposed to simultaneously explore and exploit a given set of choice alternatives in the course of a sequential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Viktor Bengs , Robert Busa-Fekete , Adil El Mesaoudi-Paul , Eyke Hüllermeier

Taking advantage of contextual information can potentially boost the performance of recommender systems. In the era of big data, such side information often has several dimensions. Thus, developing decision-making algorithms to cope with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-26 Saeed Ghoorchian , Evgenii Kortukov , Setareh Maghsudi

We study linear contextual bandits with access to a large, confounded, offline dataset that was sampled from some fixed policy. We show that this problem is closely related to a variant of the bandit problem with side information. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-11 Guy Tennenholtz , Uri Shalit , Shie Mannor , Yonathan Efroni

Conversational recommendation systems elicit user preferences by interacting with users to obtain their feedback on recommended commodities. Such systems utilize a multi-armed bandit framework to learn user preferences in an online manner…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-29 Shuhua Yang , Hui Yuan , Xiaoying Zhang , Mengdi Wang , Hong Zhang , Huazheng Wang

The contextual duelling bandit problem models adaptive recommender systems, where the algorithm presents a set of items to the user, and the user's choice reveals their preference. This setup is well suited for implicit choices users make…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Suryanarayana Sankagiri , Jalal Etesami , Pouria Fatemi , Matthias Grossglauser