English
Related papers

Related papers: Neural Risk-sensitive Satisficing in Contextual Ba…

200 papers

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

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly popular, there is a growing need to predict which out of a set of LLMs will yield a successful answer to a given query at low cost. This problem promises to become even more relevant as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Baran Atalar , Eddie Zhang , Carlee Joe-Wong

The primary goal of my Ph.D. study is to develop provably efficient and practical algorithms for data-driven sequential decision-making under uncertainty. My work focuses on reinforcement learning (RL), multi-armed bandits, and their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Zhiyong Wang

We consider contextual linear bandits over networks, a class of sequential decision-making problems where learning occurs simultaneously across multiple locations and the reward distributions share structural similarities while also…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Chuyun Deng , Huiwen Jia

Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving real-world decision making problems. In practice, collecting a contextual bandit's feedback from different domains may involve different costs. For example, measuring drug reaction from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Ziyan Wang , Xiaoming Huo , Hao Wang

Personalized recommendations for new users, also known as the cold-start problem, can be formulated as a contextual bandit problem. Existing contextual bandit algorithms generally rely on features alone to capture user variability. Such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-25 Li Zhou , Emma Brunskill

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

We study the stochastic contextual bandit problem, where the reward is generated from an unknown function with additive noise. No assumption is made about the reward function other than boundedness. We propose a new algorithm, NeuralUCB,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-03 Dongruo Zhou , Lihong Li , Quanquan Gu

Model misspecification is a major consideration in applications of statistical methods and machine learning. However, it is often neglected in contextual bandits. This paper studies a common form of misspecification, an inter-arm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Rong Zhu , Branislav Kveton

We consider a novel variant of the contextual bandit problem (i.e., the multi-armed bandit with side-information, or context, available to a decision-maker) where the reward associated with each context-based decision may not always be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-21 Djallel Bouneffouf , Sohini Upadhyay , Yasaman Khazaeni

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for adaptive precision tuning for linear solvers, which can be extended to general algorithms. The framework is formulated as a contextual bandit problem and solved using incremental…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Erin Carson , Xinye Chen

The increasing complexity of wireless technologies, such as Wi-Fi, presents significant challenges for Rate Adaptation (RA) due to the large configuration space of transmission parameters. While extensive research has been conducted on RA…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2025-04-09 Ruben Queiros , Megumi Kaneko , Helder Fontes , Rui Campos

Contextual bandits are a common problem faced by machine learning practitioners in domains as diverse as hypothesis testing to product recommendations. There have been a lot of approaches in exploiting rich data representations for…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-03-20 Aniket Anand Deshmukh , Abhimanu Kumar , Levi Boyles , Denis Charles , Eren Manavoglu , Urun Dogan

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

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

In this paper, we investigate the impact of context diversity on stochastic linear contextual bandits. As opposed to the previous view that contexts lead to more difficult bandit learning, we show that when the contexts are sufficiently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Weiqiang Wu , Jing Yang , Cong Shen

Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving many real-world interactive machine learning problems. Despite multiple recent successes on statistically and computationally efficient methods, the practical behavior of these…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-08 Alberto Bietti , Alekh Agarwal , John Langford

The linear submodular bandit problem was proposed to simultaneously address diversified retrieval and online learning in a recommender system. If there is no uncertainty, this problem is equivalent to a submodular maximization problem under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Sho Takemori , Masahiro Sato , Takashi Sonoda , Janmajay Singh , Tomoko Ohkuma

We consider the linear contextual bandit problem with resource consumption, in addition to reward generation. In each round, the outcome of pulling an arm is a reward as well as a vector of resource consumptions. The expected values of…

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

In this paper, we propose and study opportunistic contextual bandits - a special case of contextual bandits where the exploration cost varies under different environmental conditions, such as network load or return variation in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Xueying Guo , Xiaoxiao Wang , Xin Liu