Related papers: Identifiable Latent Bandits: Leveraging observatio…
The rapid advancement in large language models (LLMs) has brought forth a diverse range of models with varying capabilities that excel in different tasks and domains. However, selecting the optimal LLM for user queries often involves a…
Equitably allocating limited resources in high-stakes domains-such as education, employment, and healthcare-requires balancing short-term utility with long-term impact, while accounting for delayed outcomes, hidden heterogeneity, and…
Online decision-making can be formulated as the popular stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where a learner makes decisions (or takes actions) to maximize cumulative rewards collected from an unknown environment. This paper proposes to…
The stochastic contextual bandit problem, which models the trade-off between exploration and exploitation, has many real applications, including recommender systems, online advertising and clinical trials. As many other machine learning…
We consider the contextual bandit problem on general action and context spaces, where the learner's rewards depend on their selected actions and an observable context. This generalizes the standard multi-armed bandit to the case where side…
Motivated by problems of learning to rank long item sequences, we introduce a variant of the cascading bandit model that considers flexible length sequences with varying rewards and losses. We formulate two generative models for this…
We present substantial evidence demonstrating the benefits of integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with a Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit framework. Contextual bandits have been widely used in recommendation systems to generate…
Collaborative bandit learning, i.e., bandit algorithms that utilize collaborative filtering techniques to improve sample efficiency in online interactive recommendation, has attracted much research attention as it enjoys the best of both…
Extracting actionable intelligence from distributed, heterogeneous, correlated and high-dimensional data sources requires run-time processing and learning both locally and globally. In the last decade, a large number of meta-learning…
Contextual multi-armed bandits are classical models in reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making associated with individual information. A widely-used policy for bandits is Thompson Sampling, where samples from a data-driven…
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…
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…
In nonstationary bandit learning problems, the decision-maker must continually gather information and adapt their action selection as the latent state of the environment evolves. In each time period, some latent optimal action maximizes…
Causal knowledge can be used to support decision-making problems. This has been recognized in the causal bandits literature, where a causal (multi-armed) bandit is characterized by a causal graphical model and a target variable. The arms…
An individual's decisions are often guided by those of his or her peers, i.e., neighbors in a social network. Presumably, being privy to the experiences of others aids in learning and decision making, but how much advantage does an…
We study the problem of using causal models to improve the rate at which good interventions can be learned online in a stochastic environment. Our formalism combines multi-arm bandits and causal inference to model a novel type of bandit…
Active learning methods have shown great promise in reducing the number of samples necessary for learning. As automated learning systems are adopted into real-time, real-world decision-making pipelines, it is increasingly important that…
In this paper, we consider a best action identification problem in the stochastic linear bandit setup with a fixed confident constraint. In the considered best action identification problem, instead of minimizing the accumulative regret as…
Recommender systems are a ubiquitous feature of online platforms. Increasingly, they are explicitly tasked with increasing users' long-term satisfaction. In this context, we study a content exploration task, which we formalize as a…
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…