Related papers: Bi-Level Contextual Bandits for Individualized Res…

We study contextual bandits in the stochastic i.i.d.\ setting, where a learner observes contexts drawn from an unknown distribution, selects actions from a finite set $A$, and aims to identify an approximately optimal policy from a given…

We study a sequential resource allocation problem involving a fixed number of recurring jobs. At each time-step the manager should distribute available resources among the jobs in order to maximise the expected number of completed jobs.…

Preference-based feedback is important for many applications where direct evaluation of a reward function is not feasible. A notable recent example arises in reinforcement learning from human feedback on large language models. For many of…

Traditional imitation learning focuses on modeling the behavioral mechanisms of experts, which requires a large amount of interaction history generated by some fixed expert. However, in many streaming applications, such as streaming…

We investigate the feasibility of learning from a mix of both fully-labeled supervised data and contextual bandit data. We specifically consider settings in which the underlying learning signal may be different between these two data…

Recently, self-learning methods based on user satisfaction metrics and contextual bandits have shown promising results to enable consistent improvements in conversational AI systems. However, directly targeting such metrics by off-policy…

Dialog response selection is an important step towards natural response generation in conversational agents. Existing work on neural conversational models mainly focuses on offline supervised learning using a large set of context-response…

Many efficient algorithms with strong theoretical guarantees have been proposed for the contextual multi-armed bandit problem. However, applying these algorithms in practice can be difficult because they require domain expertise to build…

Standard approaches to decision-making under uncertainty focus on sequential exploration of the space of decisions. However, \textit{simultaneously} proposing a batch of decisions, which leverages available resources for parallel…

This paper is a scoping study to identify current methods used in handling sparse data with contextual bandits in web settings. The area is highly current and state of the art methods are identified. The years 2017-2020 are investigated,…

In this paper, we address the stochastic contextual linear bandit problem, where a decision maker is provided a context (a random set of actions drawn from a distribution). The expected reward of each action is specified by the inner…

Artificial behavioral agents are often evaluated based on their consistent behaviors and performance to take sequential actions in an environment to maximize some notion of cumulative reward. However, human decision making in real life…

Stochastic linear bandits are a natural and well-studied model for structured exploration/exploitation problems and are widely used in applications such as online marketing and recommendation. One of the main challenges faced by…

Contextual bandits are widely-used in the study of learning-based control policies for finite action spaces. While the problem is well-studied for bandits with perfectly observed context vectors, little is known about the case of…

We introduce contextual queueing bandits, a new context-aware framework for scheduling while simultaneously learning unknown service rates. Individual jobs carry heterogeneous contextual features, based on which the agent chooses a job and…

The contextual bandit problem is a theoretically justified framework with wide applications in various fields. While the previous study on this problem usually requires independence between noise and contexts, our work considers a more…

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…

Bandit learning is characterized by the tension between long-term exploration and short-term exploitation. However, as has recently been noted, in settings in which the choices of the learning algorithm correspond to important decisions…

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…

Recommendation systems when employed in markets play a dual role: they assist users in selecting their most desired items from a large pool and they help in allocating a limited number of items to the users who desire them the most. Despite…