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We study the best-arm identification problem with fixed confidence when contextual (covariate) information is available in stochastic bandits. Although we can use contextual information in each round, we are interested in the marginalized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Masahiro Kato , Kaito Ariu

Causal discovery aims to uncover cause-and-effect relationships encoded in causal graphs by leveraging observational, interventional data, or their combination. The majority of existing causal discovery methods are developed assuming…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Muhammad Qasim Elahi , Lai Wei , Murat Kocaoglu , Mahsa Ghasemi

We study the problem of contextual combinatorial semi-bandits, where input contexts are mapped into subsets of size $m$ of a collection of $K$ possible actions. In each round, the learner observes the realized reward of the predicted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Liad Erez , Tomer Koren

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 combinatorial pure exploration of causal bandits is the following online learning task: given a causal graph with unknown causal inference distributions, in each round we choose a subset of variables to intervene or do no intervention,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Nuoya Xiong , Wei Chen

When an AI system interacts with multiple users, it frequently needs to make allocation decisions. For instance, a virtual agent decides whom to pay attention to in a group setting, or a factory robot selects a worker to deliver a part.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-18 Yifang Chen , Alex Cuellar , Haipeng Luo , Jignesh Modi , Heramb Nemlekar , Stefanos Nikolaidis

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 · Computer Science 2018-12-18 Maria Dimakopoulou , Zhengyuan Zhou , Susan Athey , Guido Imbens

We consider the stochastic contextual bandit problem with additional regularization. The motivation comes from problems where the policy of the agent must be close to some baseline policy which is known to perform well on the task. To…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-06 Xavier Fontaine , Quentin Berthet , Vianney Perchet

Motivated by online recommendation and advertising systems, we consider a causal model for stochastic contextual bandits with a latent low-dimensional confounder. In our model, there are $L$ observed contexts and $K$ arms of the bandit. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-28 Rajat Sen , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Murat Kocaoglu , Alexandros G. Dimakis , Sanjay Shakkottai

The causal bandit problem seeks to identify, through sequential experimentation, an intervention that maximizes the expected reward in a causal system modeled by a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Existing methods typically assume that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yijia Zhao , Qing Zhou

We study the causal bandit problem that entails identifying a near-optimal intervention from a specified set $A$ of (possibly non-atomic) interventions over a given causal graph. Here, an optimal intervention in ${A}$ is one that maximizes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Ayush Sawarni , Rahul Madhavan , Gaurav Sinha , Siddharth Barman

We propose an efficient Context-Aware clustering of Bandits (CAB) algorithm, which can capture collaborative effects. CAB can be easily deployed in a real-world recommendation system, where multi-armed bandits have been shown to perform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-28 Shuai Li , Purushottam Kar

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

Contextual multi-armed bandits are a popular choice to model sequential decision-making. E.g., in a healthcare application we may perform various tests to asses a patient condition (exploration) and then decide on the best treatment to give…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Mirco Mutti , Jeongyeol Kwon , Shie Mannor , Aviv Tamar

Contextual bandits are widely used in industrial personalization systems. These online learning frameworks learn a treatment assignment policy in the presence of treatment effects that vary with the observed contextual features of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-11 Claudia Roberts , Maria Dimakopoulou , Qifeng Qiao , Ashok Chandrashekhar , Tony Jebara

In this paper, we address the problem of identifying the Pareto Set under feasibility constraints in a multivariate bandit setting. Specifically, given a $K$-armed bandit with unknown means $\mu_1, \dots, \mu_K \in \mathbb{R}^d$, the goal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-11 Cyrille Kone , Emilie Kaufmann , Laura Richert

The improving multi-armed bandits problem is a formal model for allocating effort under uncertainty, motivated by scenarios such as investing research effort into new technologies, performing clinical trials, and hyperparameter selection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Avrim Blum , Marten Garicano , Kavya Ravichandran , Dravyansh Sharma

Clinical trials involving multiple treatments utilize randomization of the treatment assignments to enable the evaluation of treatment efficacies in an unbiased manner. Such evaluation is performed in post hoc studies that usually use…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-09-10 Yogatheesan Varatharajah , Brent Berry , Sanmi Koyejo , Ravishankar Iyer

We study the problem of learning the causal relationships between a set of observed variables in the presence of latents, while minimizing the cost of interventions on the observed variables. We assume access to an undirected graph $G$ on…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-12-29 Raghavendra Addanki , Andrew McGregor , Cameron Musco

Multi-armed bandit problems are receiving a great deal of attention because they adequately formalize the exploration-exploitation trade-offs arising in several industrially relevant applications, such as online advertisement and, more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-11-05 Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Claudio Gentile , Giovanni Zappella