English
Related papers

Related papers: Learning with Incomplete Context: Linear Contextua…

200 papers

We consider stochastic non-stationary linear bandits where the linear parameter connecting contexts to the reward changes over time. Existing algorithms in this setting localize the policy by gradually discarding or down-weighting past…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-05 Margherita Lazzaretto , Jonas Peters , Niklas Pfister

We consider an online decision making setting known as contextual bandit problem, and propose an approach for improving contextual bandit performance by using an adaptive feature extraction (representation learning) based on online…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Baihan Lin , Djallel Bouneffouf , Guillermo Cecchi , Irina Rish

A standard assumption in contextual multi-arm bandit is that the true context is perfectly known before arm selection. Nonetheless, in many practical applications (e.g., cloud resource management), prior to arm selection, the context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Jianyi Yang , Shaolei Ren

Efficient online decision-making in contextual bandits is challenging, as methods without informative priors often suffer from computational or statistical inefficiencies. In this work, we leverage pre-trained diffusion models as expressive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Imad Aouali

We consider a novel variant of the contextual bandit problem (i.e., the multi-armed bandit with side-information, or context, available to a decision-maker) where the reward associated with each context-based decision may not always be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-21 Djallel Bouneffouf , Sohini Upadhyay , Yasaman Khazaeni

Conversational contextual bandits elicit user preferences by occasionally querying for explicit feedback on key-terms to accelerate learning. However, there are aspects of existing approaches which limit their performance. First,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Zhiyong Wang , Xutong Liu , Shuai Li , John C. S. Lui

Contextual bandit algorithms are commonly used in digital health to recommend personalized treatments. However, to ensure the effectiveness of the treatments, patients are often requested to take actions that have no immediate benefit to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Kyra Gan , Esmaeil Keyvanshokooh , Xueqing Liu , Susan Murphy

We present conservative distributed multi-task learning in stochastic linear contextual bandits with heterogeneous agents. This extends conservative linear bandits to a distributed setting where M agents tackle different but related tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Jiabin Lin , Shana Moothedath

Traditional online learning models are typically initialized from scratch. By contrast, contemporary real-world applications often have access to historical datasets that can potentially enhanced the online learning processes. We study how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Wang Chi Cheung , Lixing Lyu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin

Personalized recommendations for new users, also known as the cold-start problem, can be formulated as a contextual bandit problem. Existing contextual bandit algorithms generally rely on features alone to capture user variability. Such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-25 Li Zhou , Emma Brunskill

Contextual bandits (CB) are online sequential decision-making problems under partial feedback that underpin many adaptive services. There is a growing demand to deploy CB agents directly on-device, under strict constraints on memory,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Marco Angioli , Kevin Johansson , Antonello Rosato , Amy Loutfi , Denis Kleyko

We study contextual bandit (CB) problems, where the user can sometimes respond with the best action in a given context. Such an interaction arises, for example, in text prediction or autocompletion settings, where a poor suggestion is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-09 Alekh Agarwal , Claudio Gentile , Teodor V. Marinov

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

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

Conservative Contextual Bandits (CCBs) address safety in sequential decision making by requiring that an agent's policy, along with minimizing regret, also satisfies a safety constraint: the performance is not worse than a baseline policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Rohan Deb , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Arindam Banerjee

For infinite action contextual bandits, smoothed regret and reduction to regression results in state-of-the-art online performance with computational cost independent of the action set: unfortunately, the resulting data exhaust does not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Mark Rucker , Yinglun Zhu , Paul Mineiro

We consider the problem where M agents collaboratively interact with an instance of a stochastic K-armed contextual bandit, where K>>M. The goal of the agents is to simultaneously minimize the cumulative regret over all the agents over a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-16 Jiabin Lin , Shana Moothedath

This paper presents a new algorithm for neural contextual bandits (CBs) that addresses the challenge of delayed reward feedback, where the reward for a chosen action is revealed after a random, unknown delay. This scenario is common in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Mohammadali Moghimi , Sharu Theresa Jose , Shana Moothedath

Safety is a desirable property that can immensely increase the applicability of learning algorithms in real-world decision-making problems. It is much easier for a company to deploy an algorithm that is safe, i.e., guaranteed to perform at…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-07 Abbas Kazerouni , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Benjamin Van Roy