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Online platforms increasingly rely on sequential decision-making algorithms to allocate resources, match users, or control exposure, while facing growing pressure to ensure fairness over time. We study a general online decision-making…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-13 Rui Chen , Oktay Gunluk , Andrea Lodi , Guanyi Wang

In performative prediction, the deployment of a predictive model triggers a shift in the data distribution. As these shifts are typically unknown ahead of time, the learner needs to deploy a model to get feedback about the distribution it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Meena Jagadeesan , Tijana Zrnic , Celestine Mendler-Dünner

Users of recommender systems often behave in a non-stationary fashion, due to their evolving preferences and tastes over time. In this work, we propose a practical approach for fast personalization to non-stationary users. The key idea is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Joey Hong , Branislav Kveton , Manzil Zaheer , Yinlam Chow , Amr Ahmed , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Craig Boutilier

Computationally efficient contextual bandits are often based on estimating a predictive model of rewards given contexts and arms using past data. However, when the reward model is not well-specified, the bandit algorithm may incur…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-14 Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Vitor Hadad , Susan Athey

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin , David Simchi-Levi , Yunzong Xu

We investigate online scheduling with commitment for parallel identical machines. Our objective is to maximize the total processing time of accepted jobs. As soon as a job has been submitted, the commitment constraint forces us to decide…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-04-15 Chris Schwiegelshohn , Uwe Schwiegelshohn

We study the problem of expert advice under partial bandit feedback setting and create a sequential minimax optimal algorithm. Our algorithm works with a more general partial monitoring setting, where, in contrast to the classical bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-15 Kaan Gokcesu , Hakan Gokcesu

We study an online decision making problem where on each round a learner chooses a list of items based on some side information, receives a scalar feedback value for each individual item, and a reward that is linearly related to this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-07 Akshay Krishnamurthy , Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudik

In real-world streaming recommender systems, user preferences evolve dynamically over time. Existing bandit-based methods treat time merely as a timestamp, neglecting its explicit relationship with user preferences and leading to suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Chenglei Shen , Yi Zhan , Weijie Yu , Xiao Zhang , Jun Xu

Motivated by the fact that humans like some level of unpredictability or novelty, and might therefore get quickly bored when interacting with a stationary policy, we introduce a novel non-stationary bandit problem, where the expected reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Pierre Laforgue , Giulia Clerici , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Ran Gilad-Bachrach

Online learning algorithms, widely used to power search and content optimization on the web, must balance exploration and exploitation, potentially sacrificing the experience of current users in order to gain information that will lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Manish Raghavan , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Jennifer Wortman Vaughan , Zhiwei Steven Wu

Offline policy learning (OPL) leverages existing data collected a priori for policy optimization without any active exploration. Despite the prevalence and recent interest in this problem, its theoretical and algorithmic foundations in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Sunil Gupta , A. Tuan Nguyen , Svetha Venkatesh

We study a variant of causal contextual bandits where the context is chosen based on an initial intervention chosen by the learner. At the beginning of each round, the learner selects an initial action, depending on which a stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Rahul Madhavan , Aurghya Maiti , Gaurav Sinha , Siddharth Barman

We consider an online two-stage stochastic optimization with long-term constraints over a finite horizon of $T$ periods. At each period, we take the first-stage action, observe a model parameter realization and then take the second-stage…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-03 Piao Hu , Jiashuo Jiang , Guodong Lyu , Hao Su

When an AI system interacts with multiple users, it frequently needs to make allocation decisions. For instance, a virtual agent decides whom to pay attention to in a group setting, or a factory robot selects a worker to deliver a part.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-18 Yifang Chen , Alex Cuellar , Haipeng Luo , Jignesh Modi , Heramb Nemlekar , Stefanos Nikolaidis

Learning from human feedback plays an important role in aligning generative models, such as large language models (LLM). However, the effectiveness of this approach can be influenced by adversaries, who may intentionally provide misleading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Qiwei Di , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

Multi-armed bandit problems are the most basic examples of sequential decision problems with an exploration-exploitation trade-off. This is the balance between staying with the option that gave highest payoffs in the past and exploring new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-11-06 Sébastien Bubeck , Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

We consider a version of the continuum armed bandit where an action induces a filtered realisation of a non-homogeneous Poisson process. Point data in the filtered sample are then revealed to the decision-maker, whose reward is the total…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-21 James A. Grant , Roberto Szechtman

We formalize sequential decision-making with information acquisition as the probing-augmented user-centric selection (PUCS) framework, where a learner first probes a subset of arms to obtain side information on resources and rewards, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Tianyi Xu , Yiting Chen , Henger Li , Zheyong Bian , Emiliano Dall'Anese , Zizhan Zheng