Related papers: Neural Dueling Bandits: Preference-Based Optimizat…
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…
We study the $K$-armed contextual dueling bandit problem, a sequential decision making setting in which the learner uses contextual information to make two decisions, but only observes \emph{preference-based feedback} suggesting that one…
Preference-based feedback is important for many applications where direct evaluation of a reward function is not feasible. A notable recent example arises in reinforcement learning from human feedback on large language models. For many of…
Collecting human preference feedback is often expensive, leading recent works to develop principled algorithms to select them more efficiently. However, these works assume that the underlying reward function is linear, an assumption that…
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…
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…
Learning from human feedback plays an important role in aligning generative models, such as large language models (LLM). However, the effectiveness of this approach can be influenced by adversaries, who may intentionally provide misleading…
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…
We consider the problem of stochastic $K$-armed dueling bandit in the contextual setting, where at each round the learner is presented with a context set of $K$ items, each represented by a $d$-dimensional feature vector, and the goal of…
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a popular approach to align language models (LMs) with human preferences. This method involves collecting a large dataset of human pairwise preferences across various text…
Contextual dueling bandits form a cornerstone of preference-based decision-making, with critical applications in recommender systems and large language model alignment. However, standard algorithms rely on the idealized assumption of…
For a real-world decision-making problem, the reward function often needs to be engineered or learned. A popular approach is to utilize human feedback to learn a reward function for training. The most straightforward way to do so is to ask…
We consider the regret minimization task in a dueling bandits problem with context information. In every round of the sequential decision problem, the learner makes a context-dependent selection of two choice alternatives (arms) to be…
We consider the problem of learning to choose actions using contextual information when provided with limited feedback in the form of relative pairwise comparisons. We study this problem in the dueling-bandits framework of Yue et al.…
Research on the multi-armed bandit problem has studied the trade-off of exploration and exploitation in depth. However, there are numerous applications where the cardinal absolute-valued feedback model (e.g. ratings from one to five) is not…
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…
We present algorithms for reducing the Dueling Bandits problem to the conventional (stochastic) Multi-Armed Bandits problem. The Dueling Bandits problem is an online model of learning with ordinal feedback of the form "A is preferred to B"…
The contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a widely used framework for problems requiring sequential decision-making under uncertainty, such as recommendation systems. In applications involving a large number of users, the performance of…
Contextual bandit learning is a reinforcement learning problem where the learner repeatedly receives a set of features (context), takes an action and receives a reward based on the action and context. We consider this problem under a…
We study here the problem of learning the exploration exploitation trade-off in the contextual bandit problem with linear reward function setting. In the traditional algorithms that solve the contextual bandit problem, the exploration is a…