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Related papers: Sparse Nonparametric Contextual Bandits

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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 multi-armed bandits are classical models in reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making associated with individual information. A widely-used policy for bandits is Thompson Sampling, where samples from a data-driven…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-30 Hongju Park , Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh

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

Thompson Sampling (TS) is one of the most effective algorithms for solving contextual multi-armed bandit problems. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, called Neural Thompson Sampling, which adapts deep neural networks for both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Weitong Zhang , Dongruo Zhou , Lihong Li , Quanquan Gu

In (online) learning theory the concepts of sparsity, variance and curvature are well-understood and are routinely used to obtain refined regret and generalization bounds. In this paper we further our understanding of these concepts in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-06 Sébastien Bubeck , Michael B. Cohen , Yuanzhi Li

We study stochastic linear bandits where, in each round, the learner receives a set of actions (i.e., feature vectors), from which it chooses an element and obtains a stochastic reward. The expected reward is a fixed but unknown linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Tianyuan Jin , Kyoungseok Jang , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

We study the contextual multi-armed bandit problem with a finite context space (a.k.a. subpopulations), where the learner recommends a best action for each context and is evaluated by context-weighted simple regret. Our guarantees are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Mohammad Shahverdikondori , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash

We study the problem of meta-learning several contextual stochastic bandits tasks by leveraging their concentration around a low-dimensional affine subspace, which we learn via online principal component analysis to reduce the expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Steven Bilaj , Sofien Dhouib , Setareh Maghsudi

We propose a simple model selection approach for algorithms in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. As opposed to prior work that (implicitly) assumes knowledge of the optimal regret, we only require that each base…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Aldo Pacchiano , Christoph Dann , Claudio Gentile , Peter Bartlett

We consider the stochastic linear (multi-armed) contextual bandit problem with the possibility of hidden simple multi-armed bandit structure in which the rewards are independent of the contextual information. Algorithms that are designed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-07 Niladri S. Chatterji , Vidya Muthukumar , Peter L. Bartlett

We prove an instance independent (poly) logarithmic regret for stochastic contextual bandits with linear payoff. Previously, in \cite{chu2011contextual}, a lower bound of $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ is shown for the contextual linear bandit…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-05-23 Avishek Ghosh , Abishek Sankararaman

Contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms have been shown promising for maximizing cumulative rewards in sequential decision tasks such as news article recommendation systems, web page ad placement algorithms, and mobile health.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-01 Gi-Soo Kim , Myunghee Cho Paik

We consider a special case of bandit problems, named batched bandits, in which an agent observes batches of responses over a certain time period. Unlike previous work, we consider a more practically relevant batch-centric scenario of batch…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Danil Provodin , Pratik Gajane , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Maurits Kaptein

There are two variants of the classical multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem that have received considerable attention from machine learning researchers in recent years: contextual bandits and simple regret minimization. Contextual bandits are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-27 Aniket Anand Deshmukh , Srinagesh Sharma , James W. Cutler , Mark Moldwin , Clayton Scott

We propose feature perturbation, a simple yet effective exploration strategy for contextual bandits that injects randomness directly into feature inputs, instead of randomizing unknown parameters or adding noise to rewards. Remarkably, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Seouh-won Yi , Min-hwan Oh

Restless bandit problems assume time-varying reward distributions of the arms, which adds flexibility to the model but makes the analysis more challenging. We study learning algorithms over the unknown reward distributions and prove a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-15 Young Hun Jung , Marc Abeille , Ambuj Tewari

We describe a novel algorithm for noisy global optimisation and continuum-armed bandits, with good convergence properties over any continuous reward function having finitely many polynomial maxima. Over such functions, our algorithm…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-09-30 Adam D. Bull

Optimal regret bounds for Multi-Armed Bandit problems are now well documented. They can be classified into two categories based on the growth rate with respect to the time horizon $T$: (i) small, distribution-dependent, bounds of order of…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-04-12 Arthur Flajolet , Patrick Jaillet

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

We study finite-armed semiparametric bandits, where each arm's reward combines a linear component with an unknown, potentially adversarial shift. This model strictly generalizes classical linear bandits and reflects complexities common in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-18 Seok-Jin Kim , Gi-Soo Kim , Min-hwan Oh