arXiv AI By Peiying Zhu, Sidi Chang

When Outcome Looks Right But Discipline Fails: Trace-Based Evaluation Under Hidden Competitor State

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arXiv:2605. 18580v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Outcome-only evaluation can certify economically unsafe agents: a policy can hit a business KPI while violating deployable behavioral discipline.

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When Offline Evaluation Misleads: A Diagnostic Protocol for Reward and Policy Selection in Delayed-Feedback Contextual Bandits

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.