Related papers: Contextual Bandits for Unbounded Context Distribut…
In decision-making problems such as the multi-armed bandit, an agent learns sequentially by optimizing a certain feedback. While the mean reward criterion has been extensively studied, other measures that reflect an aversion to adverse…
We study contextual bandit learning with an abstract policy class and continuous action space. We obtain two qualitatively different regret bounds: one competes with a smoothed version of the policy class under no continuity assumptions,…
Linear contextual bandit is an important class of sequential decision making problems with a wide range of applications to recommender systems, online advertising, healthcare, and many other machine learning related tasks. While there is a…
Model selection in contextual bandits is an important complementary problem to regret minimization with respect to a fixed model class. We consider the simplest non-trivial instance of model-selection: distinguishing a simple multi-armed…
We study a generalization of the problem of online learning in adversarial linear contextual bandits by incorporating loss functions that belong to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, which allows for a more flexible modeling of complex…
This paper presents a finite-time analysis of the KL-UCB algorithm, an online, horizon-free index policy for stochastic bandit problems. We prove two distinct results: first, for arbitrary bounded rewards, the KL-UCB algorithm satisfies a…
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…
We study the offline contextual bandit problem, where we aim to acquire an optimal policy using observational data. However, this data usually contains two deficiencies: (i) some variables that confound actions are not observed, and (ii)…
The contextual bandit has been identified as a powerful framework to formulate the recommendation process as a sequential decision-making process, where each item is regarded as an arm and the objective is to minimize the regret of $T$…
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…
We consider the stochastic contextual bandit problem with additional regularization. The motivation comes from problems where the policy of the agent must be close to some baseline policy which is known to perform well on the task. To…
We consider the setup of stochastic multi-armed bandits in the case when reward distributions are piecewise i.i.d. and bounded with unknown changepoints. We focus on the case when changes happen simultaneously on all arms, and in stark…
We provide the first oracle efficient sublinear regret algorithms for adversarial versions of the contextual bandit problem. In this problem, the learner repeatedly makes an action on the basis of a context and receives reward for the…
We consider the linear contextual bandit problem with resource consumption, in addition to reward generation. In each round, the outcome of pulling an arm is a reward as well as a vector of resource consumptions. The expected values of…
We present a new algorithm for the contextual bandit learning problem, where the learner repeatedly takes one of $K$ actions in response to the observed context, and observes the reward only for that chosen action. Our method assumes access…
For traffic routing platforms, the choice of which route to recommend to a user depends on the congestion on these routes -- indeed, an individual's utility depends on the number of people using the recommended route at that instance.…
In this work, we study the performance of the Thompson Sampling algorithm for Contextual Bandit problems based on the framework introduced by Neu et al. and their concept of lifted information ratio. First, we prove a comprehensive bound on…
This paper studies the adversarial graphical contextual bandits, a variant of adversarial multi-armed bandits that leverage two categories of the most common side information: \emph{contexts} and \emph{side observations}. In this setting, a…
We study best-of-both-worlds algorithms for $K$-armed linear contextual bandits. Our algorithms deliver near-optimal regret bounds in both the adversarial and stochastic regimes, without prior knowledge about the environment. In the…
In this paper, we address the contextual dueling bandit problem by proposing variance-aware algorithms that leverage neural networks to approximate nonlinear utility functions. Our approach employs a \textit{variance-aware exploration…