A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
Contextual bandit algorithms provide principled online learning solutions to balance the exploitation-exploration trade-off in various applications such as recommender systems. However, the learning speed of the traditional contextual bandit algorithms is often slow due to the need for extensive exploration. This poses…
We describe MELEE, a meta-learning algorithm for learning a good exploration policy in the interactive contextual bandit setting. Here, an algorithm must take actions based on contexts, and learn based only on a reward signal from the action taken, thereby generating an exploration/exploitation trade-off. MELEE address…
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 estimation problems along the path of learning. We study a consideration for the expl…
We consider an online decision making setting known as contextual bandit problem, and propose an approach for improving contextual bandit performance by using an adaptive feature extraction (representation learning) based on online clustering. Our approach starts with an off-line pre-training on unlabeled history of co…
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 algorithms is still poorly understood. We leverage the availability of large numbers of …
Scarce data is a major challenge to scaling robot learning to truly complex tasks, as we need to generalize locally learned policies over different task contexts. Contextual policy search offers data-efficient learning and generalization by explicitly conditioning the policy on a parametric context space. In this paper…
The performance of machine learning model can be further improved if contextual cues are provided as input along with base features that are directly related to an inference task. In offline learning, one can inspect historical training data to identify contextual clusters either through feature clustering, or hand-cra…
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 estimation problems along the path of learning. We develop algorithms for contextual …
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 epsilon-greedy exploration policies. Here we present a deep learning framework for cont…
Contextual bandits are online learners that, given an input, select an arm and receive a reward for that arm. They use the reward as a learning signal and aim to maximize the total reward over the inputs. Contextual bandits are commonly used to solve recommendation or ranking problems. This paper considers a learning s…
Taxonomies are semantic hierarchies of concepts. One limitation of current taxonomy learning systems is that they define concepts as single words. This position paper argues that contextualized word representations, which recently achieved state-of-the-art results on many competitive NLP tasks, are a promising method t…
In this paper we propose the multi-objective contextual bandit problem with similarity information. This problem extends the classical contextual bandit problem with similarity information by introducing multiple and possibly conflicting objectives. Since the best arm in each objective can be different given the contex…
Contextual policy search allows adapting robotic movement primitives to different situations. For instance, a locomotion primitive might be adapted to different terrain inclinations or desired walking speeds. Such an adaptation is often achievable by modifying a small number of hyperparameters. However, learning, when …
Improved off-policy selection and learning in contextual bandits with better guarantees.
problem Selecting or training a reward-maximizing policy using data from a fixed behavior policy.
method A betting-based confidence bound applied to an inverse propensity weight sequence for off-policy selection, and a freezing condition for off-policy learning.
result The proposed methods achieve significantly improved guarantees over prior work, especially in small-data regimes.
We study offline data poisoning attacks in contextual bandits, a class of reinforcement learning problems with important applications in online recommendation and adaptive medical treatment, among others. We provide a general attack framework based on convex optimization and show that by slightly manipulating rewards i…