Related papers: Balancing optimism and pessimism in offline-to-onl…
In online marketing, the advertisers aim to balance achieving high volumes and high profitability. The companies' business units address this tradeoff by maximizing the volumes while guaranteeing a minimum Return On Investment (ROI) level.…
We study a finite-horizon restless multi-armed bandit problem with multiple actions, dubbed R(MA)^2B. The state of each arm evolves according to a controlled Markov decision process (MDP), and the reward of pulling an arm depends on both…
In this paper, we consider a risk-averse multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem where the goal is to learn a policy that minimizes the risk of low expected return, as opposed to maximizing the expected return itself, which is the objective in the…
Machine unlearning aims to unlearn data points from a learned model, offering a principled way to process data-deletion requests and mitigate privacy risks without full retraining. Prior work has mainly studied unsupervised / supervised…
Motivated by applications of bandit algorithms in education, we consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with $\varepsilon$-contaminated rewards. We allow an adversary to give arbitrary unbounded contaminated rewards with full…
We present an online tutoring system that learns to provide effective feedback to students after they answer questions incorrectly. Using data from one million students, the system learns which assistance action (e.g., one of multiple…
Contextual bandit algorithms provide principled online learning solutions to balance the exploitation-exploration trade-off in various applications such as recommender systems. However, the learning speed of the traditional contextual…
The analysis of online least squares estimation is at the heart of many stochastic sequential decision making problems. We employ tools from the self-normalized processes to provide a simple and self-contained proof of a tail bound of a…
In this article, we propose a novel pessimism-based Bayesian learning method for optimal dynamic treatment regimes in the offline setting. When the coverage condition does not hold, which is common for offline data, the existing solutions…
This paper is concerned with the asynchronous form of Q-learning, which applies a stochastic approximation scheme to Markovian data samples. Motivated by the recent advances in offline reinforcement learning, we develop an algorithmic…
We consider offline policy optimization (OPO) in contextual bandits, where one is given a fixed dataset of logged interactions. While pessimistic regularizers are typically used to mitigate distribution shift, prior implementations thereof…
Motivated by applications in clinical trials and finance, we study the problem of online convex optimization (with bandit feedback) where the decision maker is risk-averse. We provide two algorithms to solve this problem. The first one is a…
We present a family $\{\hat{\pi}\}_{p\ge 1}$ of pessimistic learning rules for offline learning of linear contextual bandits, relying on confidence sets with respect to different $\ell_p$ norms, where $\hat{\pi}_2$ corresponds to…
In the reinforcement learning literature, there are many algorithms developed for either Contextual Bandit (CB) or Markov Decision Processes (MDP) environments. However, when deploying reinforcement learning algorithms in the real world,…
Existing risk-aware multi-armed bandit models typically focus on risk measures of individual options such as variance. As a result, they cannot be directly applied to important real-world online decision making problems with correlated…
Stochastic multi-armed bandits form a class of online learning problems that have important applications in online recommendation systems, adaptive medical treatment, and many others. Even though potential attacks against these learning…
A fundamental challenge in contextual bandits is to develop flexible, general-purpose algorithms with computational requirements no worse than classical supervised learning tasks such as classification and regression. Algorithms based on…
A general framework of personalized federated multi-armed bandits (PF-MAB) is proposed, which is a new bandit paradigm analogous to the federated learning (FL) framework in supervised learning and enjoys the features of FL with…
Offline reinforcement learning aims to learn an agent from pre-collected datasets, avoiding unsafe and inefficient real-time interaction. However, inevitable access to out-ofdistribution actions during the learning process introduces…
Combinatorial bandits extend the classical bandit framework to settings where the learner selects multiple arms in each round, motivated by applications such as online recommendation and assortment optimization. While extensions of upper…