Personalizing marketing messages with contextual multi-armed bandits (CMABs) drives real business value, yet the objective that ultimately matters - a downstream conversion - is observed only weeks later, too late to drive online learning. Teams therefore train the bandit on a fast proxy reward, and separately must judge whether a contextual bandit is worth its complexity over sending one best message.
arXiv:2606. 02595v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dynamic pricing in short-term rental (STR) markets presents a distinctive challenge for online learning algorithms: pricing decisions carry significant financial risk, operators require explainability, and market feedback is sparse (one booking outcome per listed night).
By Oleg Miroshnichenko
arXiv:2004. 06321v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the sequential batch learning problem in linear contextual bandits with finite action sets, where the decision maker is constrained to split incoming individuals into (at most) a fixed number of batches and can only observe outcomes for the individuals within a batch at the batch's end.
By Yanjun Han, Zhengqing Zhou, Zihao Hu, Jose Blanchet, Peter W. Glynn, Yinyu Ye, Zhengyuan Zhou
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. 00155v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study runtime human oversight of an AI agent when private information runs in both directions: the human privately knows her reward function, while the AI privately knows the quality of the action it proposes.
By Yunjin Tong
arXiv:2501. 07761v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Increasingly, recommender systems are tasked with improving users' long-term satisfaction.
By Kelly W. Zhang, Thomas Baldwin-McDonald, Kamil Ciosek, Lucas Maystre, Daniel Russo
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:2608. 12831v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Online platforms increasingly compare many adaptive decision policies---ranking systems, recommendation algorithms, pricing rules, and language-model agents---while each reward-bearing interaction can be costly or risky.
By Yuxiao Wen
arXiv:2606. 29980v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Zero-shot Transfer in Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to train an agent that can generate optimal policies for any reward function, without additional learning at transfer time, while training only on reward-free trajectories.
By Louis Bagot (SyCoSMA), Mathieu Lefort (LIRIS, SyCoSMA, IRISA, MALT, UR), La\"etitia Matignon (SyCoSMA)
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: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. 19883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem in the competitive setup with two-sided matching markets under a human centric decision making model.
By Ananya Kunisetty, Avishek Ghosh