arXiv AI

The Minimal Search Space for Conditional Causal Bandits

arXiv:2502. 06577v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Causal knowledge can be used to support decision-making problems.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

Bridging Rested and Restless Bandits with Graph-Triggering: Rising and Rotting

arXiv:2409. 05980v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Rested and Restless Bandits are two well-known bandit settings that are useful to model real-world sequential decision-making problems in which the expected reward of an arm evolves over time due to the actions we perform or due to the nature.

By Gianmarco Genalti, Marco Mussi, Nicola Gatti, Marcello Restelli, Matteo Castiglioni, Alberto Maria Metelli
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Fixed-Confidence Best-Arm Identification for Causal Mediation Analysis

arXiv:2607. 04315v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper studies the problem of identifying the treatment that maximizes the expected natural direct potential outcome (NDPO), which captures the potential outcome of an intervention while excluding the pathway transmitted through a mediator that researchers may wish to remove from evaluation.

By Harsh Shrivastava, Yuta Kawakami, Junpei Komiyama, Jin Tian
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Budget-Constrained Causal Bandits: Bridging Uplift Modeling and Sequential Decision-Making

The paper introduces Budget-Constrained Causal Bandits (BCCB), an online framework that learns individual treatment effects, explores uncertain users, and manages budget pacing simultaneously. It derives a per-arrival decision rule from a KKT condition of a Lagrangian relaxation, providing a principled algorithmic foundation. Experiments on the Criteo Uplift dataset show BCCB outperforms offline pipelines and other online baselines, especially when historical data is scarce (below 7,500 observations).

By Abhirami Pillai
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 15

Optimal and Efficient Contextual Combinatorial Semi-bandits with General Function Approximation

We study the contextual combinatorial semi-bandit (CCSB) problem with general reward function approximation. At each round, the learner observes a context, selects a combinatorial action consisting of a subset of basic arms, and receives the reward of each selected arm; the goal is to maximize the cumulative reward over time.