Related papers: BanditLP: Large-Scale Stochastic Optimization for …
In today's technology environment, information is abundant, dynamic, and heterogeneous in nature. Automated filtering and prioritization of information is based on the distinction between whether the information adds substantial value…
The design of personalized incentives or recommendations to improve user engagement is gaining prominence as digital platform providers continually emerge. We propose a multi-armed bandit framework for matching incentives to users, whose…
Multi-armed bandits (MAB) are extensively studied in various settings where the objective is to \textit{maximize} the actions' outcomes (i.e., rewards) over time. Since safety is crucial in many real-world problems, safe versions of MAB…
This paper presents a concise review of Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit (CMAB) methods and introduces an experimental framework for scalable, interpretable offer selection, addressing the challenge of fast-changing offers. The approach models…
Most learning to rank research has assumed that the utility of different documents is independent, which results in learned ranking functions that return redundant results. The few approaches that avoid this have rather unsatisfyingly…
Contextual multi-armed bandit problems arise frequently in important industrial applications. Existing solutions model the context either linearly, which enables uncertainty driven (principled) exploration, or non-linearly, by using…
We study how to use naturally available user feedback, such as clicks, to optimize large language model (LLM) pipelines for generating personalized sentences using prompts. Naive approaches, which estimate the policy gradient in the prompt…
We study Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits (CMABs) for non-episodic sequential decision making problems where the context includes both textual and numerical information (e.g., recommendation systems, dynamic portfolio adjustments, offer…
As the cornerstone of modern portfolio theory, Markowitz's mean-variance optimization is considered a major model adopted in portfolio management. However, due to the difficulty of estimating its parameters, it cannot be applied to all…
Long-context modeling is critical for a wide range of real-world tasks, including long-context question answering, summarization, and complex reasoning tasks. Recent studies have explored fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with…
Contextual bandits are incredibly useful in many practical problems. We go one step further by devising a more realistic problem that combines: (1) contextual bandits with dense arm features, (2) non-linear reward functions, and (3) a…
Current endpointing (EP) solutions learn in a supervised framework, which does not allow the model to incorporate feedback and improve in an online setting. Also, it is a common practice to utilize costly grid-search to find the best…
In this paper, we consider the contextual variant of the MNL-Bandit problem. More specifically, we consider a dynamic set optimization problem, where a decision-maker offers a subset (assortment) of products to a consumer and observes the…
Contextual bandits are a form of multi-armed bandit in which the agent has access to predictive side information (known as the context) for each arm at each time step, and have been used to model personalized news recommendation, ad…
We consider the model selection task in the stochastic contextual bandit setting. Suppose we are given a collection of base contextual bandit algorithms. We provide a master algorithm that combines them and achieves the same performance, up…
Recommendation systems are a key modern application of machine learning, but they have the downside that they often draw upon sensitive user information in making their predictions. We show how to address this deficiency by basing a…
Large language models (LLMs) have been adopted to solve sequential decision-making tasks such as multi-armed bandits (MAB), in which an LLM is directly instructed to select the arms to pull in every iteration. However, this paradigm of…
Contextual bandits algorithms aim to choose the optimal arm with the highest reward out of a set of candidates based on the contextual information. Various bandit algorithms have been applied to real-world applications due to their ability…
Thompson sampling provides a solution to bandit problems in which new observations are allocated to arms with the posterior probability that an arm is optimal. While sometimes easy to implement and asymptotically optimal, Thompson sampling…
Bandit algorithms solve diverse sequential decision-making problems, but are often too sample-inefficient for from-scratch personalization. To substantially reduce exploration times, latent bandit algorithms exploit cross-instance structure…