Related papers: A Simple Reduction Scheme for Constrained Contextu…
We study budget-constrained contextual bandits with adversarial contexts, where each action yields a random reward and incurs a random cost. We adopt the standard realizability assumption: conditioned on the observed context, rewards and…
Contextual bandit learning is a reinforcement learning problem where the learner repeatedly receives a set of features (context), takes an action and receives a reward based on the action and context. We consider this problem under a…
Conservative Contextual Bandits (CCBs) address safety in sequential decision making by requiring that an agent's policy, along with minimizing regret, also satisfies a safety constraint: the performance is not worse than a baseline policy…
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…
We study contextual bandits with budget and time constraints, referred to as constrained contextual bandits.The time and budget constraints significantly complicate the exploration and exploitation tradeoff because they introduce complex…
A fundamental challenge in contextual bandits is to develop flexible, general-purpose algorithms with computational requirements no worse than classical supervised learning tasks such as classification and regression. Algorithms based on…
We present a new algorithm for the contextual bandit learning problem, where the learner repeatedly takes one of $K$ actions in response to the observed context, and observes the reward only for that chosen action. Our method assumes access…
We study the stochastic contextual bandit with knapsacks (CBwK) problem, where each action, taken upon a context, not only leads to a random reward but also costs a random resource consumption in a vector form. The challenge is to maximize…
We study contextual bandits in the presence of a stage-wise constraint when the constraint must be satisfied both with high probability and in expectation. We start with the linear case where both the reward function and the stage-wise…
A major challenge in contextual bandits is to design general-purpose algorithms that are both practically useful and theoretically well-founded. We present a new technique that has the empirical and computational advantages of…
Recent work shows that when contexts are drawn i.i.d., linear contextual bandits can be reduced to single-context linear bandits. This ``contexts are cheap" perspective is highly advantageous, as it allows for sharper finite-time analyses…
We consider the general (stochastic) contextual bandit problem under the realizability assumption, i.e., the expected reward, as a function of contexts and actions, belongs to a general function class $\mathcal{F}$. We design a fast and…
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…
We introduce a stochastic contextual bandit model where at each time step the environment chooses a distribution over a context set and samples the context from this distribution. The learner observes only the context distribution while the…
Contextual bandits are a rich model for sequential decision making given side information, with important applications, e.g., in recommender systems. We propose novel algorithms for contextual bandits harnessing neural networks to…
Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the strategy deployed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. Further, often we have only partial information on the state of the system. We study the…
Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…
We consider contextual bandits with linear constraints (CBwLC), a variant of contextual bandits in which the algorithm consumes multiple resources subject to linear constraints on total consumption. This problem generalizes contextual…
Many sequential decision-making problems in communication networks can be modeled as contextual bandit problems, which are natural extensions of the well-known multi-armed bandit problem. In contextual bandit problems, at each time, an…
We consider Contextual Bandits with Concave Rewards (CBCR), a multi-objective bandit problem where the desired trade-off between the rewards is defined by a known concave objective function, and the reward vector depends on an observed…