A Direct Approach for Handling Contextual Bandits with Latent State Dynamics
arXiv:2604. 08149v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider a linear contextual bandit model where contexts and rewards are governed by a finite hidden Markov chain.
The paper introduces Latent Order Bandits (LOB), a new bandit framework that relaxes the strict assumptions of traditional latent bandits by only requiring a partial order of action preferences within each latent state. LOB allows instances sharing the same state to have different reward distributions as long as the action ranking remains consistent, making it suitable for scenarios like user groups on streaming services who agree on genre preferences but rate differently. The authors present an upper‑confidence bound algorithm for both total and partial latent orders, provide regret bounds, and propose a posterior‑sampling variant that empirically outperforms full‑prior latent bandits when reward scales vary across instances sharing the same latent state.
arXiv:2604. 08149v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider a linear contextual bandit model where contexts and rewards are governed by a finite hidden Markov chain.
arXiv:2604. 00531v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-task representation learning exploits the shared structure among related tasks by learning a common latent representation, thereby improving sample efficiency.
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.
arXiv:2501. 07761v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Increasingly, recommender systems are tasked with improving users' long-term satisfaction.
arXiv:2606. 14929v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern recommendation systems increasingly rely on dynamically routing diverse queries to multiple embedding models.
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.
The paper investigates preference-based bandits where a learner selects pairs of arms and receives binary preference feedback modeled by Bradley–Terry. It introduces the locally sensitive eluder dimension, a new complexity measure for logistic preference feedback, and proposes the GINOP algorithm that uses log-loss confidence sets to balance optimism and exploration. The authors prove a first-order regret bound showing that learning with preference feedback can be as statistically efficient as learning from direct rewards, and they validate their theory with empirical experiments.
In many online learning and bandit problems, the actions we consider possess inherent similarities--for instance because they share latent traits, tags, or hierarchical structure. We study online learning with a similarity-structured action set, encoded by a rooted tree whose leaves are the actions and whose levels quantify how closely two actions are related.
arXiv:2609.13564v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study KL-regularized contextual bandits under both reward and preference feedback. We show that greedy sampling can achieve logarithmic regret witho...
arXiv:2607. 08971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The stochastic linear bandit, where actions are represented as vectors and rewards are linear, is a central paradigm for sequential decision making.
arXiv:2605. 09454v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the $\textit{single-index bandit}$ problem, where rewards depend on an unknown one-dimensional projection of high-dimensional contexts through an unknown reward function.
arXiv:2607. 28408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This thesis studies policy learning in interactive systems where an agent observes a context, selects an action from a very large set, and receives partial feedback.