Contextual Bandits for Maximizing Stimulated Word-of-Mouth Rewards
arXiv:2606. 15146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stimulated word-of-mouth is a strategy that promotes information sharing through prompts or incentives.
arXiv:2510. 19119v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In networked environments, it is common for users to share recommendations about content, products, services, and possible courses of action.
arXiv:2606. 15146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stimulated word-of-mouth is a strategy that promotes information sharing through prompts or incentives.
arXiv:2501. 07761v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Increasingly, recommender systems are tasked with improving users' long-term satisfaction.
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:2606. 29322v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Collaborative learning is sustainable only when it benefits each participant.
arXiv:2606. 14929v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern recommendation systems increasingly rely on dynamically routing diverse queries to multiple embedding models.
arXiv:2602. 23565v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In many economically relevant contexts where machine learning is deployed, multiple platforms obtain data from the same pool of users, each of whom selects the platform that best serves them.
arXiv:2608. 11560v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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.
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.
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.
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:2602. 02061v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Explosive demands for LLMs often cause user queries to accumulate in server queues, requiring efficient routing (query-LLM matching) and scheduling (query prioritization) mechanisms.
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.