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Contextual multi-armed bandit is a fundamental learning framework for making a sequence of decisions, e.g., advertising recommendations for a sequence of arriving users. Recent works have shown that clustering these users based on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Jingyuan Liu , Zeyu Zhang , Xuchuang Wang , Xutong Liu , John C. S. Lui , Mohammad Hajiesmaili , Carlee Joe-Wong

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a method for estimating the return of a target policy using some pre-collected observational data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. In some cases, there may be unmeasured variables that can…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-03 Yang Xu , Jin Zhu , Chengchun Shi , Shikai Luo , Rui Song

We address the problem of learning in an online, bandit setting where the learner must repeatedly select among $K$ actions, but only receives partial feedback based on its choices. We establish two new facts: First, using a new algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-10-28 Alina Beygelzimer , John Langford , Lihong Li , Lev Reyzin , Robert E. Schapire

We address the problem of learning in an online setting where the learner repeatedly observes features, selects among a set of actions, and receives reward for the action taken. We provide the first efficient algorithm with an optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-06-17 Miroslav Dudik , Daniel Hsu , Satyen Kale , Nikos Karampatziakis , John Langford , Lev Reyzin , Tong Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-03 Moise Blanchard , Steve Hanneke , Patrick Jaillet

This paper investigates the problem of online prediction learning, where learning proceeds continuously as the agent interacts with an environment. The predictions made by the agent are contingent on a particular way of behaving,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-08 Sina Ghiassian , Andrew Patterson , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton , Adam White

We study risk-aware offline policy learning, aiming to learn a decision rule from logged data that is optimal under general risk criteria. This problem is crucial in high-stakes domains where online interaction is infeasible and adverse…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-18 Yilong Wan , Yuqiang Li , Xianyi Wu

The matrix contextual bandit (CB), as an extension of the well-known multi-armed bandit, is a powerful framework that has been widely applied in sequential decision-making scenarios involving low-rank structure. In many real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Yao Wang , Jiannan Li , Yue Kang , Shanxing Gao , Zhenxin Xiao

The problem of multi-armed bandits (MAB) asks to make sequential decisions while balancing between exploitation and exploration, and have been successfully applied to a wide range of practical scenarios. Various algorithms have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Xiaojin Zhang , Shuai Li , Weiwen Liu , Shengyu Zhang

Evaluating a policy by deploying it in the real world can be risky and costly. Off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) algorithms use historical data collected from running a previous policy to evaluate a new policy, which provides a means for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-12-07 Zhaohan Daniel Guo , Philip S. Thomas , Emma Brunskill

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is widely applied in sectors such as pharmaceuticals and e-commerce to evaluate the efficacy of novel products or policies from offline datasets. This paper introduces a causal deepset framework that relaxes…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-26 Runpeng Dai , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou , Shikai Luo , Zhiwei Qin , Chengchun Shi , Hongtu Zhu

In a sequential decision-making problem, off-policy evaluation estimates the expected cumulative reward of a target policy using logged trajectory data generated from a different behavior policy, without execution of the target policy.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Jie Wang , Rui Gao , Hongyuan Zha

We introduce a novel framework called combinatorial logistic bandits (CLogB), where in each round, a subset of base arms (called the super arm) is selected, with the outcome of each base arm being binary and its expectation following a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Xutong Liu , Xiangxiang Dai , Xuchuang Wang , Mohammad Hajiesmaili , John C. S. Lui

A stochastic combinatorial semi-bandit is an online learning problem where at each step a learning agent chooses a subset of ground items subject to combinatorial constraints, and then observes stochastic weights of these items and receives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-01 Zheng Wen , Branislav Kveton , Azin Ashkan

We consider a model-based approach to perform batch off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. Our method takes a mixture-of-experts approach to combine parametric and non-parametric models of the environment such that the final value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Omer Gottesman , Yao Liu , Scott Sussex , Emma Brunskill , Finale Doshi-Velez

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

We consider the problem of contextual bandits where actions are subsets of a ground set and mean rewards are modeled by an unknown monotone submodular function that belongs to a class $\mathcal{F}$. We allow time-varying matroid constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Dean P. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin

Off-policy learning is a framework for optimizing policies without deploying them, using data collected by another policy. In recommender systems, this is especially challenging due to the imbalance in logged data: some items are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Matej Cief , Branislav Kveton , Michal Kompan

In combinatorial causal bandits (CCB), the learning agent chooses a subset of variables in each round to intervene and collects feedback from the observed variables to minimize expected regret or sample complexity. Previous works study this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Shi Feng , Nuoya Xiong , Wei Chen

We consider off-policy evaluation and optimization with continuous action spaces. We focus on observational data where the data collection policy is unknown and needs to be estimated. We take a semi-parametric approach where the value…

Econometrics · Economics 2019-07-23 Mert Demirer , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Greg Lewis , Victor Chernozhukov