Related papers: Sparse Nonparametric Contextual Bandits
We study nonparametric contextual bandits under batch constraints, where the expected reward for each action is modeled as a smooth function of covariates, and the policy updates are made at the end of each batch of observations. We…
Thompson Sampling has been widely used for contextual bandit problems due to the flexibility of its modeling power. However, a general theory for this class of methods in the frequentist setting is still lacking. In this paper, we present a…
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…
We study a nonparametric contextual bandit problem where the expected reward functions belong to a H\"older class with smoothness parameter $\beta$. We show how this interpolates between two extremes that were previously studied in…
Designing efficient general-purpose contextual bandit algorithms that work with large -- or even continuous -- action spaces would facilitate application to important scenarios such as information retrieval, recommendation systems, and…
We consider stochastic multi-armed bandit problems with complex actions over a set of basic arms, where the decision maker plays a complex action rather than a basic arm in each round. The reward of the complex action is some function of…
We consider the kernelized contextual bandit problem with a large feature space. This problem involves $K$ arms, and the goal of the forecaster is to maximize the cumulative rewards through learning the relationship between the contexts and…
We consider the stochastic linear contextual bandit problem with high-dimensional features. We analyze the Thompson sampling algorithm using special classes of sparsity-inducing priors (e.g., spike-and-slab) to model the unknown parameter…
We consider the problem of contextual bandits where actions are subsets of a ground set and mean rewards are modeled by an unknown monotone submodular function that belongs to a class $\mathcal{F}$. We allow time-varying matroid constraints…
We consider the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem, where an agent sequentially chooses actions and observes rewards for the actions it took. While the majority of algorithms try to minimize the regret, i.e., the cumulative difference between…
Restless bandit problems are instances of non-stationary multi-armed bandits. These problems have been studied well from the optimization perspective, where the goal is to efficiently find a near-optimal policy when system parameters are…
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…
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…
We study bandit learning in matching markets, where players and arms constitute the two market sides, and the players' utilities are linear in the arm contexts. In each round, new arms arrive with observable contexts. Then, the algorithm…
In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, d arms are available to the decision maker who pulls them sequentially in order to maximize his cumulative reward. Guarantees can be obtained on a relative quantity called regret, which scales…
Thompson Sampling, one of the oldest heuristics for solving multi-armed bandits, has recently been shown to demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. The empirical success has led to great interests in theoretical understanding of this…
We analyze the $K$-armed bandit problem where the reward for each arm is a noisy realization based on an observed context under mild nonparametric assumptions. We attain tight results for top-arm identification and a sublinear regret of…
We consider a stochastic contextual bandit problem where the dimension $d$ of the feature vectors is potentially large, however, only a sparse subset of features of cardinality $s_0 \ll d$ affect the reward function. Essentially all…
Contextual multi-armed bandit algorithms are widely used in sequential decision tasks such as news article recommendation systems, web page ad placement algorithms, and mobile health. Most of the existing algorithms have regret proportional…
Thompson Sampling is one of the oldest heuristics for multi-armed bandit problems. It is a randomized algorithm based on Bayesian ideas, and has recently generated significant interest after several studies demonstrated it to have better…