arXiv:2610.08677v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Off-policy evaluation (OPE) for contextual bandit policies becomes challenging when action-level importance weighting incurs excessive variance. Doubly...
By Nicol\`o Felicioni, Michael Benigni, Maurizio Ferrari Dacrema, Paolo Cremonesi
The paper proposes a method for allocating limited counterfactual annotation resources from multiple sources—such as domain experts and large language models—to improve off-policy evaluation in contextual bandits. By formulating an integer optimization problem that balances source-specific costs and error rates, the authors derive a majorization‑minimization algorithm that iteratively reduces estimator variance. Experiments on synthetic clinical and education bandit data demonstrate that the optimized allocation cuts mean‑squared error by over 20% compared to no annotation.
By Biao Xiang, Ali Eshragh, Yuexing Li, Kai Wang
arXiv:2509. 03456v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Off-policy evaluation (OPE) and off-policy learning (OPL) are foundational for decision-making in offline contextual bandits.
By Imad Aouali, Otmane Sakhi
arXiv:2602. 09456v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose an algorithmic framework, Offline Estimation to Decisions (OE2D), that efficiently reduces contextual bandit learning with general reward function approximation to offline regression.
By Hao Qin, Chicheng Zhang
arXiv:2606. 00913v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-arm bandit algorithms are increasingly used in online platforms, clinical trials, and social science experiments, but valid statistical inference on their performance remains an open challenge.
By Samya Praharaj, Chih-Yu Chang, Koulik Khamaru, Kelly W. Zhang
arXiv:2607. 09015v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study contextual bandit problems with correlated arms and access to surrogate reward signals produced by a machine learning model, motivated by applications such as large language model (LLM) routing.
By Ajay Narayanan Sridhar, Ronak Singh, Mehrdad Mahdavi, Vijaykrishnan Narayanan
arXiv:2609.37209v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Pairwise losses are increasingly used for reward learning even when pointwise rewards are observed, with mixed empirical results. When and why do pairw...
By Junghyun Lee, Minsoo Ha, Sanghwa Kim, Yeongjong Kim, Eunjee Lee, Seiyun Shin, Kwang-Sung Jun
arXiv:2607. 15067v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This article presents a novel estimator for performing off-policy evaluation using only offline data for contextual bandits.
By Joshua Spear, Matthieu Komorowski, Rebecca Pope, Neil J Sebire, Erica E. M. Moodie
arXiv:2606. 09802v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider a variant of the linear contextual stochastic multi-armed bandits, where the learner must provide recommendations to a group of users, each having its personalized preference vector, and in the presence of context distributions that are drifting over time.
By Udvas Das, Waris Radji, Debabrota Basu, Odalric-Ambrym Maillard
arXiv:2608.01069v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Bandit algorithms generate data for downstream inference, but adaptive sampling biases post-bandit sample means. We analyze this bias for stable in...
By Lisu Wang, Yilun Chen, Jiaqi Lu
arXiv:2307. 03587v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In non-stationary linear contextual bandits, existing efficient algorithms typically rely on the Weighted Regularized Least-Squares (WRLS) estimator.
By Nicklas Werge, Yi-Shan Wu, Abdullah Akg\"ul, Melih Kandemir
We consider a variant of the linear contextual stochastic multi-armed bandits, where the learner must provide recommendations to a group of users, each having its personalized preference vector, and in the presence of context distributions that are drifting over time. Under practitioner-friendly assumptions, we reduce this setting to linear bandit with stationary mean but heteroskedastic and non-stationary noise.