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This paper studies the problem of optimally allocating treatments in the presence of spillover effects, using information from a (quasi-)experiment. I introduce a method that maximizes the sample analog of average social welfare when…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-04-09 Davide Viviano

Distributionally robust policy learning aims to find a policy that performs well under the worst-case distributional shift, and yet most existing methods for robust policy learning consider the worst-case joint distribution of the covariate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jingyuan Wang , Zhimei Ren , Ruohan Zhan , Zhengyuan Zhou

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-05 Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudík , Satyen Kale , John Langford , Robert E. Schapire

Motivated by recommendation problems in music streaming platforms, we propose a nonstationary stochastic bandit model in which the expected reward of an arm depends on the number of rounds that have passed since the arm was last pulled.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-20 Leonardo Cella , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

This paper proposes a novel method to estimate individualised treatment assignment rules. The method is designed to find rules that are stochastic, reflecting uncertainty in estimation of an assignment rule and about its welfare…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-02-22 Toru Kitagawa , Hugo Lopez , Jeff Rowley

This paper studies an online optimal resource reservation problem in communication networks with job transfers where the goal is to minimize the reservation cost while maintaining the blocking cost under a certain budget limit. To tackle…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-07 Ahmed Sid-Ali , Ioannis Lambadaris , Yiqiang Q. Zhao , Gennady Shaikhet , Amirhossein Asgharnia

I propose Nonparametric Bayesian Policy Learning (NBPL) as a framework for uncertainty-aware treatment choice. I consider a decision-maker (DM) seeking to select an expected welfare-maximizing treatment rule using observable…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-19 Haonan Ye

Motivated by emerging applications such as live-streaming e-commerce, promotions and recommendations, we introduce and solve a general class of non-stationary multi-armed bandit problems that have the following two features: (i) the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-12-23 David Simchi-Levi , Zeyu Zheng , Feng Zhu

Off-policy learning (OPL) in contextual bandits aims to learn a decision-making policy that maximizes the target rewards by using only historical interaction data collected under previously developed policies. Unfortunately, when rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Rikiya Takehi , Masahiro Asami , Kosuke Kawakami , Yuta Saito

We study contextual bandits with finitely many actions in which the reward of each arm follows a single-index model with an arm-specific index parameter and an unknown nonparametric link function. We consider a regime in which arms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-20 Sakshi Arya , Satarupa Bhattacharjee , Bharath K. Sriperumbudur

The ability to exploit prior experience to solve novel problems rapidly is a hallmark of biological learning systems and of great practical importance for artificial ones. In the meta reinforcement learning literature much recent work has…

This paper studies the performative policy learning problem, where agents adjust their features in response to a released policy to improve their potential outcomes, inducing an endogenous distribution shift. There has been growing interest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Qianyi Chen , Ying Chen , Bo Li

Bandit Convex Optimization is a fundamental class of sequential decision-making problems, where the learner selects actions from a continuous domain and observes a loss (but not its gradient) at only one point per round. We study this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-02 Xiaoqi Liu , Dorian Baudry , Julian Zimmert , Patrick Rebeschini , Arya Akhavan

We propose a new sequential decision-making setting, combining key aspects of two established online learning problems with bandit feedback. The optimal action to play at any given moment is contingent on an underlying changing state which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Alexander Galozy , Slawomir Nowaczyk , Mattias Ohlsson

This article introduces an imitation learning method for learning maximum entropy policies that comply with constraints demonstrated by expert trajectories executing a task. The formulation of the method takes advantage of results…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 George Papadopoulos , George A. Vouros

This thesis studies the exploration and exploitation trade-off in online learning of properties of quantum states using multi-armed bandits. Given streaming access to an unknown quantum state, in each round we select an observable from a…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-09-30 Josep Lumbreras

This work investigates the offline formulation of the contextual bandit problem, where the goal is to leverage past interactions collected under a behavior policy to evaluate, select, and learn new, potentially better-performing, policies.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-01 Otmane Sakhi , Imad Aouali , Pierre Alquier , Nicolas Chopin

Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan , Wen Sun , Runzhe Wu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-10-15 Alekh Agarwal , Daniel Hsu , Satyen Kale , John Langford , Lihong Li , Robert E. Schapire