Related papers: Learning When to Trust in Contextual Bandits
In this paper, we investigate the impact of context diversity on stochastic linear contextual bandits. As opposed to the previous view that contexts lead to more difficult bandit learning, we show that when the contexts are sufficiently…
Contemporary AI alignment strategies rely on a fragile premise: that human feedback, while noisy, remains a fundamentally truthful signal. In this paper, we identify this assumption as Dogma 4 of Reinforcement Learning (RL). We demonstrate…
Robust reinforcement learning methods typically focus on suppressing unreliable experiences or corrupted rewards, but they lack the ability to reason about the reliability of their own learning process. As a result, such methods often…
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…
We consider contextual linear bandits over networks, a class of sequential decision-making problems where learning occurs simultaneously across multiple locations and the reward distributions share structural similarities while also…
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…
In the classical multi-armed bandit problem, instance-dependent algorithms attain improved performance on "easy" problems with a gap between the best and second-best arm. Are similar guarantees possible for contextual bandits? While…
A trustworthy reinforcement learning algorithm should be competent in solving challenging real-world problems, including {robustly} handling uncertainties, satisfying {safety} constraints to avoid catastrophic failures, and {generalizing}…
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…
Generalization and adaptation of learned skills to novel situations is a core requirement for intelligent autonomous robots. Although contextual reinforcement learning provides a principled framework for learning and generalization of…
A standard assumption in contextual multi-arm bandit is that the true context is perfectly known before arm selection. Nonetheless, in many practical applications (e.g., cloud resource management), prior to arm selection, the context…
We study the fundamental limits of learning in contextual bandits, where a learner's rewards depend on their actions and a known context, which extends the canonical multi-armed bandit to the case where side-information is available. We are…
Deep neural networks often fail catastrophically by relying on spurious correlations. Most prior work assumes a clear dichotomy into spurious and reliable features; however, this is often unrealistic. For example, most of the time we do not…
The principle of optimism in the face of uncertainty is one of the most widely used and successful ideas in multi-armed bandits and reinforcement learning. However, existing optimistic algorithms (primarily UCB and its variants) often…
We study an online decision making problem where on each round a learner chooses a list of items based on some side information, receives a scalar feedback value for each individual item, and a reward that is linearly related to this…
Bottleneck identification is a challenging task in network analysis, especially when the network is not fully specified. To address this task, we develop a unified online learning framework based on combinatorial semi-bandits that performs…
Individual agents in multi-agent (MA) systems often lack robustness, tending to blindly conform to misleading peers. We show this weakness stems from both sycophancy and inadequate ability to evaluate peer reliability. To address this, we…
Contextual multi-armed bandits (CMAB) have been widely used for learning to filter and prioritize information according to a user's interest. In this work, we analyze top-K ranking under the CMAB framework where the top-K arms are chosen…
We study constrained contextual bandits (CCB) with adversarially chosen contexts, where each action yields a random reward and incurs a random cost. We adopt the standard realizability assumption: conditioned on the observed context,…
Model misspecification is a major consideration in applications of statistical methods and machine learning. However, it is often neglected in contextual bandits. This paper studies a common form of misspecification, an inter-arm…