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Contextual bandit algorithms are ubiquitous tools for active sequential experimentation in healthcare and the tech industry. They involve online learning algorithms that adaptively learn policies over time to map observed contexts $X_t$ to…
Auctions are key for maximizing sellers' revenue and ensuring truthful bidding among buyers. Recently, an approach known as differentiable economics based on machine learning (ML) has shown promise in learning powerful auction mechanisms…
Online bidding is a classical problem in online decision-making, with applications in resource allocation, hierarchical clustering, and the analysis of approximation algorithms. We study its randomized learning-augmented variant, where an…
Many online companies sell advertisement space in second-price auctions with reserve. In this paper, we develop a probabilistic method to learn a profitable strategy to set the reserve price. We use historical auction data with features to…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) constructs confidence intervals for the value of a target policy using data generated under a different behavior policy. Most existing inference methods focus on fixed target policies and may fail when the target…
When learning policies for real-world domains, two important questions arise: (i) how to efficiently use pre-collected off-policy, non-optimal behavior data; and (ii) how to mediate among different competing objectives and constraints. We…
Auto-bidding is now widely adopted as an interface between advertisers and internet advertising as it allows advertisers to specify high-level goals, such as maximizing value subject to a value-per-spend constraint. Prior research has…
A recently popular approach to solving reinforcement learning is with data from human preferences. In fact, human preference data are now used with classic reinforcement learning algorithms such as actor-critic methods, which involve…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a method for estimating the return of a target policy using some pre-collected observational data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. In some cases, there may be unmeasured variables that can…
Aiming to overcome some of the limitations of worst-case analysis, the recently proposed framework of "algorithms with predictions" allows algorithms to be augmented with a (possibly erroneous) machine-learned prediction that they can use…
Online media provides opportunities for marketers through which they can deliver effective brand messages to a wide range of audiences. Advertising technology platforms enable advertisers to reach their target audience by delivering ad…
The problem of Offline Policy Evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a critical step towards applying RL in real-life applications. Existing work on OPE mostly focus on evaluating a fixed target policy $\pi$, which does not…
The problem of online matching with stochastic rewards is a generalization of the online bipartite matching problem where each edge has a probability of success. When a match is made it succeeds with the probability of the corresponding…
Learning to bid in repeated first-price auctions is a fundamental problem at the interface of game theory and machine learning, which has seen a recent surge in interest due to the transition of display advertising to first-price auctions.…
Since 2019, most ad exchanges and sell-side platforms (SSPs), in the online advertising industry, shifted from second to first price auctions. Due to the fundamental difference between these auctions, demand-side platforms (DSPs) have had…
Online advertising has recently grown into a highly competitive and complex multi-billion-dollar industry, with advertisers bidding for ad slots at large scales and high frequencies. This has resulted in a growing need for efficient…
This work focuses on off-policy evaluation (OPE) with function approximation in infinite-horizon undiscounted Markov decision processes (MDPs). For MDPs that are ergodic and linear (i.e. where rewards and dynamics are linear in some known…
We investigate the problem of designing randomized obviously strategy-proof (OSP) mechanisms in several canonical auction settings. Obvious strategy-proofness, introduced by Li [American Economic Review, 2017], strengthens the well-known…
We consider the problem of bidding in online advertising, where an advertiser aims to maximize value while adhering to budget and Return-on-Spend (RoS) constraints. Unlike prior work that assumes knowledge of the value generated by winning…
Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) aims to estimate the value of a target policy using offline data collected from potentially different policies. In real-world applications, however, logged data often suffers from missingness. While OPE has been…