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Contextual bandits with average-case statistical guarantees are inadequate in risk-averse situations because they might trade off degraded worst-case behaviour for better average performance. Designing a risk-averse contextual bandit is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-11 Mónika Farsang , Paul Mineiro , Wangda Zhang

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

We study structured multi-armed bandits, which is the problem of online decision-making under uncertainty in the presence of structural information. In this problem, the decision-maker needs to discover the best course of action despite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Bart P. G. Van Parys , Negin Golrezaei

Causal Bayesian networks have become a powerful technology for reasoning under uncertainty in areas that require transparency and explainability, by relying on causal assumptions that enable us to simulate hypothetical interventions. The…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-03-14 Anthony C. Constantinou , Zhigao Guo , Neville K. Kitson

We consider the problem of contextual bandits and imitation learning, where the learner lacks direct knowledge of the executed action's reward. Instead, the learner can actively query an expert at each round to compare two actions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan , Wen Sun , Runzhe Wu

Recent advances in learning techniques have garnered attention for their applicability to a diverse range of real-world sequential decision-making problems. Yet, many practical applications have critical constraints for operation in real…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Jose A. Ayala-Romero , Andres Garcia-Saavedra , Xavier Costa-Perez

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

We propose an algorithm for non-stationary kernel bandits that does not require prior knowledge of the degree of non-stationarity. The algorithm follows randomized strategies obtained by solving optimization problems that balance…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-21 Kihyuk Hong , Yuhang Li , Ambuj Tewari

Recent developments in digital platforms have highlighted the prevalence of open systems, where agents can arrive and depart over time. While bandit learning in open systems has recently received initial attention, existing work imposes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Mengfan Xu

The stochastic contextual bandit problem, which models the trade-off between exploration and exploitation, has many real applications, including recommender systems, online advertising and clinical trials. As many other machine learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-14 Qin Ding , Yue Kang , Yi-Wei Liu , Thomas C. M. Lee , Cho-Jui Hsieh , James Sharpnack

Causal discovery aims to uncover cause-and-effect relationships encoded in causal graphs by leveraging observational, interventional data, or their combination. The majority of existing causal discovery methods are developed assuming…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Muhammad Qasim Elahi , Lai Wei , Murat Kocaoglu , Mahsa Ghasemi

We study the offline contextual bandit problem, where we aim to acquire an optimal policy using observational data. However, this data usually contains two deficiencies: (i) some variables that confound actions are not observed, and (ii)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Siyu Chen , Yitan Wang , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Causality plays a pivotal role in various fields of study. Based on the framework of causal graphical models, previous works have proposed identifying whether a variable is a cause or non-cause of a target in every Markov equivalent graph…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-16 Qingyuan Zheng , Yue Liu , Yangbo He

We design and implement an adaptive experiment (a ``contextual bandit'') to learn a targeted treatment assignment policy, where the goal is to use a participant's survey responses to determine which charity to expose them to in a donation…

Tractable contextual bandit algorithms often rely on the realizability assumption - i.e., that the true expected reward model belongs to a known class, such as linear functions. In this work, we present a tractable bandit algorithm that is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Vitor Hadad , Susan Athey

Sequential decision-making under uncertainty is often associated with long feedback delays. Such delays degrade the performance of the learning agent in identifying a subset of arms with the optimal collective reward in the long run. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-19 Saeed Ghoorchian , Setareh Maghsudi

The causal bandit problem seeks to identify, through sequential experimentation, an intervention that maximizes the expected reward in a causal system modeled by a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Existing methods typically assume that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yijia Zhao , Qing Zhou

An agent in a nonstationary contextual bandit problem should balance between exploration and the exploitation of (periodic or structured) patterns present in its previous experiences. Handcrafting an appropriate historical context is an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Aditya Ramesh , Paulo Rauber , Michelangelo Conserva , Jürgen Schmidhuber

We study reward maximisation in a wide class of structured stochastic multi-armed bandit problems, where the mean rewards of arms satisfy some given structural constraints, e.g. linear, unimodal, sparse, etc. Our aim is to develop methods…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-03 Rémy Degenne , Han Shao , Wouter M. Koolen

Conservative mechanism is a desirable property in decision-making problems which balance the tradeoff between the exploration and exploitation. We propose the novel \emph{conservative contextual combinatorial cascading bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-26 Kun Wang , Canzhe Zhao , Shuai Li , Shuo Shao