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
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 18

Dynamic Pricing and Advertising with Demand Learning

arXiv:2304. 14385v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider a novel pricing and advertising framework in which a seller not only sets the product price but also designs flexible advertising schemes to influence customers' valuations of the product.

By Shipra Agrawal, Yiding Feng, Wei Tang
arXiv Machine Learning
22h ago

Online Generalized-Mean Welfare Maximization: Achieving Near-Optimal Regret from Samples

The paper investigates online fair allocation of sequential items to agents with heterogeneous preferences, aiming to maximize generalized-mean welfare. In an i.i.d. arrival setting, a pure greedy algorithm achieves near-optimal “~O(1/T)” average regret without needing distributional knowledge. For nonstationary arrivals, the authors show that a single historical sample per distribution suffices to recover the same regret rate, using re-solving algorithms that remain robust to distribution shifts.

By Zongjun Yang, Rachitesh Kumar, Christian Kroer