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We develop confidence bounds that hold uniformly over time for off-policy evaluation in the contextual bandit setting. These confidence sequences are based on recent ideas from martingale analysis and are non-asymptotic, non-parametric, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-19 Nikos Karampatziakis , Paul Mineiro , Aaditya Ramdas

Thompson Sampling is a principled method for balancing exploration and exploitation, but its real-world adoption faces computational challenges in large-scale or non-conjugate settings. While ensemble-based approaches offer partial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Yingru Li , Jiawei Xu , Baoxiang Wang , Zhi-Quan Luo

We study how to learn optimal interventions sequentially given causal information represented as a causal graph along with associated conditional distributions. Causal modeling is useful in real world problems like online advertisement…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-12 Yangyi Lu , Amirhossein Meisami , Ambuj Tewari , Zhenyu Yan

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 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

Thompson Sampling is one of the most effective methods for contextual bandits and has been generalized to posterior sampling for certain MDP settings. However, existing posterior sampling methods for reinforcement learning are limited by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-24 Christoph Dann , Mehryar Mohri , Tong Zhang , Julian Zimmert

We consider the contextual bandit problem on general action and context spaces, where the learner's rewards depend on their selected actions and an observable context. This generalizes the standard multi-armed bandit to the case where side…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-03 Moise Blanchard , Steve Hanneke , Patrick Jaillet

The contextual bandit problem, where agents arrive sequentially with personal contexts and the system adapts its arm allocation decisions accordingly, has recently garnered increasing attention for enabling more personalized outcomes.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Yiting Hu , Lingjie Duan

Contextual bandits are widely used in Internet services from news recommendation to advertising, and to Web search. Generalized linear models (logistical regression in particular) have demonstrated stronger performance than linear models in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-20 Lihong Li , Yu Lu , Dengyong Zhou

Thompson sampling has become a ubiquitous approach to online decision problems with bandit feedback. The key algorithmic task for Thompson sampling is drawing a sample from the posterior of the optimal action. We propose an alternative arm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-05 Jackie Baek , Vivek F. Farias

This work investigates the offline formulation of the contextual bandit problem, where the goal is to leverage past interactions collected under a behavior policy to evaluate, select, and learn new, potentially better-performing, policies.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-01 Otmane Sakhi , Imad Aouali , Pierre Alquier , Nicolas Chopin

Contextual dueling bandits, where a learner compares two options based on context and receives feedback indicating which was preferred, extends classic dueling bandits by incorporating contextual information for decision-making and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-10 Xuheng Li , Heyang Zhao , Quanquan Gu

Contextual bandits are canonical models for sequential decision-making under uncertainty in environments with time-varying components. In this setting, the expected reward of each bandit arm consists of the inner product of an unknown…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-05-27 Hongju Park , Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-15 Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Haipeng Luo

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

This paper studies semiparametric contextual bandits, a generalization of the linear stochastic bandit problem where the reward for an action is modeled as a linear function of known action features confounded by an non-linear…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-17 Akshay Krishnamurthy , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Vasilis Syrgkanis

Meta-learning is characterized by its ability to learn how to learn, enabling the adaptation of learning strategies across different tasks. Recent research introduced the Meta-Thompson Sampling (Meta-TS), which meta-learns an unknown prior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-09-12 Hao Li , Dong Liang , Zheng Xie

We consider a finite-horizon multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem in a Bayesian setting, for which we propose an information relaxation sampling framework. With this framework, we define an intuitive family of control policies that include…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-17 Seungki Min , Costis Maglaras , Ciamac C. Moallemi

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-05-18 Young-Geun Choi , Gi-Soo Kim , Seunghoon Paik , Myunghee Cho Paik

Thompson Sampling (TS) and its variants are powerful Multi-Armed Bandit algorithms used to balance exploration and exploitation strategies in active learning. Yet, their probabilistic nature often turns them into a "black box", hindering…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Parsa Vares , Éloi Durant , Jun Pang , Nicolas Médoc , Mohammad Ghoniem