arXiv AI By Rohan Deb, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Arindam Banerjee

Conservative Dueling Bandits: Preference Learning under Baseline Constraints

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The paper introduces conservative contextual dueling bandits, which enforce that each displayed item’s cumulative score remains above a specified fraction of a trusted baseline’s score. It presents algorithms—MaxInP-BC for linear utilities and BTIGW-BC for general utilities—that guarantee safety with high probability while achieving sublinear regret. Experiments show these methods satisfy the safety constraint more reliably than unconstrained counterparts, with only a moderate increase in regret.

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