Related papers: Second Order Bounds for Contextual Bandits with Fu…
In a low-rank linear bandit problem, the reward of an action (represented by a matrix of size $d_1 \times d_2$) is the inner product between the action and an unknown low-rank matrix $\Theta^*$. We propose an algorithm based on a novel…
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…
In the bandits with knapsacks framework (BwK) the learner has $m$ resource-consumption (packing) constraints. We focus on the generalization of BwK in which the learner has a set of general long-term constraints. The goal of the learner is…
Motivated by applications in online bidding and sleeping bandits, we examine the problem of contextual bandits with cross learning, where the learner observes the loss associated with the action across all possible contexts, not just the…
We study an algorithm-independent, worst-case lower bound for the Gaussian process (GP) bandit problem in the frequentist setting, where the reward function is fixed and has a bounded norm in the known reproducing kernel Hilbert space…
In this paper we propose the multi-objective contextual bandit problem with similarity information. This problem extends the classical contextual bandit problem with similarity information by introducing multiple and possibly conflicting…
We introduce the problem of model selection for contextual bandits, where a learner must adapt to the complexity of the optimal policy while balancing exploration and exploitation. Our main result is a new model selection guarantee for…
While numerous works have focused on devising efficient algorithms for reinforcement learning (RL) with uniformly bounded rewards, it remains an open question whether sample or time-efficient algorithms for RL with large state-action space…
We study episodic reinforcement learning with fixed reward and transition functions, but with episode-dependent admissible action sets that are observed at the start of each episode. Performance is measured by cumulative regret against the…
We give novel algorithms for multi-task and lifelong linear bandits with shared representation. Specifically, we consider the setting where we play $M$ linear bandits with dimension $d$, each for $T$ rounds, and these $M$ bandit tasks share…
Stochastic linear bandits with high-dimensional sparse features are a practical model for a variety of domains, including personalized medicine and online advertising. We derive a novel $\Omega(n^{2/3})$ dimension-free minimax regret lower…
We consider online convex optimization with a zero-order oracle feedback. In particular, the decision maker does not know the explicit representation of the time-varying cost functions, or their gradients. At each time step, she observes…
We consider the classical stochastic multi-armed bandit but where, from time to time and roughly with frequency $\epsilon$, an extra observation is gathered by the agent for free. We prove that, no matter how small $\epsilon$ is the agent…
Conservative Contextual Bandits (CCBs) address safety in sequential decision making by requiring that an agent's policy, along with minimizing regret, also satisfies a safety constraint: the performance is not worse than a baseline policy…
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…
Despite a large amount of effort in dealing with heavy-tailed error in machine learning, little is known when moments of the error can become non-existential: the random noise $\eta$ satisfies Pr$\left[|\eta| > |y|\right] \le…
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…
In the stochastic contextual bandit setting, regret-minimizing algorithms have been extensively researched, but their instance-minimizing best-arm identification counterparts remain seldom studied. In this work, we focus on the stochastic…
The analysis of online least squares estimation is at the heart of many stochastic sequential decision making problems. We employ tools from the self-normalized processes to provide a simple and self-contained proof of a tail bound of a…
We study the linear stochastic bandit problem, relaxing the standard i.i.d. assumption on the observation noise. As an alternative to this restrictive assumption, we allow the noise terms across rounds to be sub-Gaussian but interdependent,…