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Related papers: Contextual Bandit Optimization with Pre-Trained Ne…

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Most contextual bandit algorithms minimize regret against the best fixed policy, a questionable benchmark for non-stationary environments that are ubiquitous in applications. In this work, we develop several efficient contextual bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-05 Haipeng Luo , Chen-Yu Wei , Alekh Agarwal , John Langford

We study the problem of stochastic contextual bandits in the agnostic setting, where the goal is to compete with the best policy in a given class without assuming realizability or imposing model restrictions on losses or rewards. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-06 Samuel Girard , Aurelien Bibaut , Arthur Gretton , Nathan Kallus , Houssam Zenati

In this paper, we investigate the stochastic contextual bandit with general function space and graph feedback. We propose an algorithm that addresses this problem by adapting to both the underlying graph structures and reward gaps. To the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Xueping Gong , Jiheng Zhang

Many sequential decision-making problems in communication networks can be modeled as contextual bandit problems, which are natural extensions of the well-known multi-armed bandit problem. In contextual bandit problems, at each time, an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-10 Pranav Sakulkar , Bhaskar Krishnamachari

We propose a simple model selection approach for algorithms in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. As opposed to prior work that (implicitly) assumes knowledge of the optimal regret, we only require that each base…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Aldo Pacchiano , Christoph Dann , Claudio Gentile , Peter Bartlett

We study how representation learning can improve the learning efficiency of contextual bandit problems. We study the setting where we play T contextual linear bandits with dimension d simultaneously, and these T bandit tasks collectively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-08 Jiabin Lin , Shana Moothedath , Namrata Vaswani

We study a variant of causal contextual bandits where the context is chosen based on an initial intervention chosen by the learner. At the beginning of each round, the learner selects an initial action, depending on which a stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Rahul Madhavan , Aurghya Maiti , Gaurav Sinha , Siddharth Barman

Contextual bandits are a central framework for sequential decision-making, with applications ranging from recommendation systems to clinical trials. While nonparametric methods can flexibly model complex reward structures, they suffer from…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-01 Wanteng Ma , T. Tony Cai

In this paper, we address the contextual dueling bandit problem by proposing variance-aware algorithms that leverage neural networks to approximate nonlinear utility functions. Our approach employs a \textit{variance-aware exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Youngmin Oh , Jinje Park , Taejin Paik , Jaemin Park

We consider the problem of designing contextual bandit algorithms in the ``cross-learning'' setting of Balseiro et al., where the learner observes the loss for the action they play in all possible contexts, not just the context of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-04 Jon Schneider , Julian Zimmert

We propose an algorithmic framework, Offline Estimation to Decisions (OE2D), that reduces contextual bandit learning with general reward function approximation to offline regression. The framework allows near-optimal regret for contextual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Hao Qin , Chicheng Zhang

In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Ruohan Zhan , Susan Athey , Emma Brunskill

We study a class of adversarial bandit optimization problems in which the loss functions may be non-convex and non-smooth. In each round, the learner observes a loss that consists of an underlying linear component together with an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Zhuoyu Cheng , Kohei Hatano , Eiji Takimoto

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Zhou Lu , Qiuyi Zhang , Xinyi Chen , Fred Zhang , David Woodruff , Elad Hazan

We consider the problem of stochastic $K$-armed dueling bandit in the contextual setting, where at each round the learner is presented with a context set of $K$ items, each represented by a $d$-dimensional feature vector, and the goal of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Aadirupa Saha , Aditya Gopalan

We study the problem of meta-learning several contextual stochastic bandits tasks by leveraging their concentration around a low-dimensional affine subspace, which we learn via online principal component analysis to reduce the expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Steven Bilaj , Sofien Dhouib , Setareh Maghsudi

We consider the stochastic contextual bandit problem under the high dimensional linear model. We focus on the case where the action space is finite and random, with each action associated with a randomly generated contextual covariate. This…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-07 Yining Wang , Yi Chen , Ethan X. Fang , Zhaoran Wang , Runze Li

We consider the problem of model selection for the general stochastic contextual bandits under the realizability assumption. We propose a successive refinement based algorithm called Adaptive Contextual Bandit ({\ttfamily ACB}), that works…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-21 Avishek Ghosh , Abishek Sankararaman , Kannan Ramchandran

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Chung-Wei Lee , Haipeng Luo , Chen-Yu Wei , Mengxiao Zhang , Xiaojin Zhang

Many works have developed no-regret algorithms for contextual bandits with function approximation, where the mean reward function over context-action pairs belongs to a function class. Although there are many approaches to this problem, one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Aldo Pacchiano