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This paper considers a contextual bandit problem involving multiple agents, where a learner sequentially observes the contexts and the agent's reported arms, and then selects the arm that maximizes the system's overall reward. Existing work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Arun Verma , Indrajit Saha , Makoto Yokoo , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

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 $T$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-30 Yikun Ban , Yunzhe Qi , Tianxin Wei , Lihui Liu , Jingrui He

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)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Siyu Chen , Yitan Wang , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Contextual multi-armed bandits are classical models in reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making associated with individual information. A widely-used policy for bandits is Thompson Sampling, where samples from a data-driven…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-30 Hongju Park , Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh

Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-18 Maria Dimakopoulou , Zhengyuan Zhou , Susan Athey , Guido Imbens

In a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, an online algorithm makes a sequence of choices. In each round it chooses from a time-invariant set of alternatives and receives the payoff associated with this alternative. While the case of small…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2014-05-21 Aleksandrs Slivkins

We introduce a stochastic contextual bandit model where at each time step the environment chooses a distribution over a context set and samples the context from this distribution. The learner observes only the context distribution while the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-15 Johannes Kirschner , Andreas Krause

Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the strategy deployed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. Further, often we have only partial information on the state of the system. We study the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Jiabin Lin , Xian Yeow Lee , Talukder Jubery , Shana Moothedath , Soumik Sarkar , Baskar Ganapathysubramanian

The standard contextual bandit framework assumes fully observable and actionable contexts. In this work, we consider a new bandit setting with partially observable, correlated contexts and linear payoffs, motivated by the applications in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Sihan Zeng , Sujay Bhatt , Alec Koppel , Sumitra Ganesh

We consider the kernelized contextual bandit problem with a large feature space. This problem involves $K$ arms, and the goal of the forecaster is to maximize the cumulative rewards through learning the relationship between the contexts and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-21 Shogo Iwazaki , Junpei Komiyama , Masaaki Imaizumi

We study nonparametric contextual bandits under batch constraints, where the expected reward for each action is modeled as a smooth function of covariates, and the policy updates are made at the end of each batch of observations. We…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-06 Rong Jiang , Cong Ma

We design and implement an adaptive experiment (a ``contextual bandit'') to learn a targeted treatment assignment policy, where the goal is to use a participant's survey responses to determine which charity to expose them to in a donation…

In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, instance-dependent algorithms attain improved performance on "easy" problems with a gap between the best and second-best arm. Are similar guarantees possible for contextual bandits? While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin , David Simchi-Levi , Yunzong Xu

Sequential decision-making algorithms such as multi-armed bandits can find optimal personalized decisions, but are notoriously sample-hungry. In personalized medicine, for example, training a bandit from scratch for every patient is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Ahmet Zahid Balcıoğlu , Newton Mwai , Emil Carlsson , Fredrik D. Johansson

The stochastic contextual bandit problem, which models the trade-off between exploration and exploitation, has many real applications, including recommender systems, online advertising and clinical trials. As many other machine learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-14 Qin Ding , Yue Kang , Yi-Wei Liu , Thomas C. M. Lee , Cho-Jui Hsieh , James Sharpnack

Contextual bandit algorithms are at the core of many applications, including recommender systems, clinical trials, and optimal portfolio selection. One of the most popular problems studied in the contextual bandit literature is to maximize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Siddhant Chaudhary , Abhishek Sinha

Quite some real-world problems can be formulated as decision-making problems wherein one must repeatedly make an appropriate choice from a set of alternatives. Multiple expert judgements, whether human or artificial, can help in taking…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-08-30 Axel Abels , Tom Lenaerts , Vito Trianni , Ann Nowé

We study the stream-based online active learning in a contextual multi-armed bandit framework. In this framework, the reward depends on both the arm and the context. In a stream-based active learning setting, obtaining the ground truth of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-07-13 Linqi Song

Reinforcement learning addresses the dilemma between exploration to find profitable actions and exploitation to act according to the best observations already made. Bandit problems are one such class of problems in stateless environments…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-02-20 Ananda Narayanan B , Balaraman Ravindran

We consider a contextual version of multi-armed bandit problem with global knapsack constraints. In each round, the outcome of pulling an arm is a scalar reward and a resource consumption vector, both dependent on the context, and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-07-12 Shipra Agrawal , Nikhil R. Devanur , Lihong Li