Related papers: Direction-Aware Offline-to-Online Learning in Line…
We study the problems of offline and online contextual optimization with feedback information, where instead of observing the loss, we observe, after-the-fact, the optimal action an oracle with full knowledge of the objective function would…
We study locally differentially private (LDP) bandits learning in this paper. First, we propose simple black-box reduction frameworks that can solve a large family of context-free bandits learning problems with LDP guarantee. Based on our…
This paper studies federated linear contextual bandits under the notion of user-level differential privacy (DP). We first introduce a unified federated bandits framework that can accommodate various definitions of DP in the sequential…
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)…
We study how to adapt to smoothly-varying ('easy') environments in well-known online learning problems where acquiring information is expensive. For the problem of label efficient prediction, which is a budgeted version of prediction with…
We revisit the question of reducing online learning to approximate optimization of the offline problem. In this setting, we give two algorithms with near-optimal performance in the full information setting: they guarantee optimal regret and…
In online exploration systems where users with fixed preferences repeatedly arrive, it has recently been shown that O(1), i.e., bounded regret, can be achieved when the system is modeled as a linear contextual bandit. This result may be of…
We present a family $\{\hat{\pi}\}_{p\ge 1}$ of pessimistic learning rules for offline learning of linear contextual bandits, relying on confidence sets with respect to different $\ell_p$ norms, where $\hat{\pi}_2$ corresponds to…
We study linear bandits when the underlying reward function is not linear. Existing work relies on a uniform misspecification parameter $\epsilon$ that measures the sup-norm error of the best linear approximation. This results in an…
We study offline-online reinforcement learning in linear mixture Markov decision processes (MDPs) under environment shift. In the offline phase, data are collected by an unknown behavior policy and may come from a mismatched environment,…
Modern systems, such as digital platforms and service systems, increasingly rely on contextual bandits for online decision-making; however, their deployment can inadvertently create unfair exposure among arms, undermining long-term platform…
We formalize sequential decision-making with information acquisition as the probing-augmented user-centric selection (PUCS) framework, where a learner first probes a subset of arms to obtain side information on resources and rewards, and…
We consider the problem of using observational bandit feedback data from multiple heterogeneous data sources to learn a personalized decision policy that robustly generalizes across diverse target settings. To achieve this, we propose a…
We study online meta-learning with bandit feedback, with the goal of improving performance across multiple tasks if they are similar according to some natural similarity measure. As the first to target the adversarial online-within-online…
Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving many real-world interactive machine learning problems. Despite multiple recent successes on statistically and computationally efficient methods, the practical behavior of these…
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…
Contextual bandit algorithms are commonly used in digital health to recommend personalized treatments. However, to ensure the effectiveness of the treatments, patients are often requested to take actions that have no immediate benefit to…
This paper introduces a new online learning framework for multiclass classification called learning with diluted bandit feedback. At every time step, the algorithm predicts a candidate label set instead of a single label for the observed…
Online model selection in Bayesian bandits raises a fundamental exploration challenge: When an environment instance is sampled from a prior distribution, how can we design an adaptive strategy that explores multiple bandit learners and…
Classic contextual bandit algorithms for linear models, such as LinUCB, assume that the reward distribution for an arm is modeled by a stationary linear regression. When the linear regression model is non-stationary over time, the regret of…