Related papers: Contextual Bandits for Unbounded Context Distribut…
A challenging aspect of the bandit problem is that a stochastic reward is observed only for the chosen arm and the rewards of other arms remain missing. The dependence of the arm choice on the past context and reward pairs compounds the…
We consider an adversarial variant of the classic $K$-armed linear contextual bandit problem where the sequence of loss functions associated with each arm are allowed to change without restriction over time. Under the assumption that the…
We provide a simple method to combine stochastic bandit algorithms. Our approach is based on a "meta-UCB" procedure that treats each of $N$ individual bandit algorithms as arms in a higher-level $N$-armed bandit problem that we solve with a…
We revisit the classic regret-minimization problem in the stochastic multi-armed bandit setting when the arm-distributions are allowed to be heavy-tailed. Regret minimization has been well studied in simpler settings of either bounded…
We study the Linear Contextual Bandit problem in the hybrid reward setting. In this setting every arm's reward model contains arm specific parameters in addition to parameters shared across the reward models of all the arms. We can reduce…
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…
Fast changing states or volatile environments pose a significant challenge to online optimization, which needs to perform rapid adaptation under limited observation. In this paper, we give query and regret optimal bandit algorithms under…
We introduce Conformal Bandits, a novel framework integrating Conformal Prediction (CP) into bandit problems, a classic paradigm for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. Traditional regret-minimisation bandit strategies like…
Standard approaches to decision-making under uncertainty focus on sequential exploration of the space of decisions. However, \textit{simultaneously} proposing a batch of decisions, which leverages available resources for parallel…
We examine a multi-armed bandit problem with contextual information, where the objective is to ensure that each arm receives a minimum aggregated reward across contexts while simultaneously maximizing the total cumulative reward. This…
In contextual continuum-armed bandits, the contexts $x$ and the arms $y$ are both continuous and drawn from high-dimensional spaces. The payoff function to learn $f(x,y)$ does not have a particular parametric form. The literature has shown…
We study nonparametric contextual bandits where Lipschitz mean reward functions may change over time. We first establish the minimax dynamic regret rate in this less understood setting in terms of number of changes $L$ and total-variation…
In this paper, we consider the problem of black-box optimization with noisy feedback revealed in batches, where the unknown function to optimize has a bounded norm in some Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). We refer to this as the…
Variance-dependent regret bounds for linear contextual bandits, which improve upon the classical $\tilde{O}(d\sqrt{K})$ regret bound to $\tilde{O}(d\sqrt{\sum_{k=1}^K\sigma_k^2})$, where $d$ is the context dimension, $K$ is the number of…
In this work, we develop linear bandit algorithms that automatically adapt to different environments. By plugging a novel loss estimator into the optimization problem that characterizes the instance-optimal strategy, our first algorithm not…
Optimal regret bounds for Multi-Armed Bandit problems are now well documented. They can be classified into two categories based on the growth rate with respect to the time horizon $T$: (i) small, distribution-dependent, bounds of order of…
In this paper we adapt the nearest neighbour rule to the contextual bandit problem. Our algorithm handles the fully adversarial setting in which no assumptions at all are made about the data-generation process. When combined with a…
We consider a contextual bandit problem with a combinatorial action set and time-varying base arm availability. At the beginning of each round, the agent observes the set of available base arms and their contexts and then selects an action…
Non-stationarity is ubiquitous in human behavior and addressing it in the contextual bandits is challenging. Several works have addressed the problem by investigating semi-parametric contextual bandits and warned that ignoring…
We study batched nonparametric contextual bandits under a margin condition when the margin parameter $\alpha$ is unknown. To capture the statistical cost of this ignorance, we introduce the regret inflation criterion, defined as the ratio…