A Direct Approach for Handling Contextual Bandits with Latent State Dynamics
We consider a linear contextual bandit model where contexts and rewards are governed by a finite hidden Markov chain. We first revisit the simplified model by Nelson et al. (2022), in which rewards are linear functions of the posterior probabilities over the hidden states given the observed contexts (called beliefs), rather than functions of the hidden states themselves. This simplified model may be handled through a direct reduction to standard linear contextual bandits. We extend the theoretical analysis of this reduction to take into account the estimation of the parameters of the hidden Markov model [HMM] in the regret bound and to provide high-probability bounds not depending anymore on the reward functions and only depending on the model through the estimation of the HMM parameters. Second, and most importantly, we instead study the more natural and more complex model incorporating direct dependencies in the hidden states (on top of dependencies on the observed contexts, as is natural for contextual bandits). Under a classic HMM forgetting condition, the main algorithmic tool introduced to cope with the various statistical dependencies that the reward structure introduces is to only periodically update reward-model parameters.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Contextual Bandits with Sparse Data in Web setting
This paper is a scoping study to identify current methods used in handling sparse data with contextual bandits in web settings. The area is highly current and state of the art methods are identified. The years 2017-2020 …
ArticlesDimensionality ReductionMulti-Armed BanditsLatent Contextual Bandits and their Application to Personalized Recommendations for New Users
Personalized recommendations for new users, also known as the cold-start problem, can be formulated as a contextual bandit problem. Existing contextual bandit algorithms generally rely on features alone to capture user v…
Multi-Armed BanditsUpper Counterfactual Confidence Bounds: a New Optimism Principle for Contextual Bandits
The principle of optimism in the face of uncertainty is one of the most widely used and successful ideas in multi-armed bandits and reinforcement learning. However, existing optimistic algorithms (primarily UCB and its v…
counterfactualMulti-Armed BanditsregressionSequential Monte Carlo Bandits
In this paper we propose a flexible and efficient framework for handling multi-armed bandits, combining sequential Monte Carlo algorithms with hierarchical Bayesian modeling techniques. The framework naturally encompasse…
Multi-Armed BanditsUnifying Clustered and Non-stationary Bandits
Non-stationary bandits and online clustering of bandits lift the restrictive assumptions in contextual bandits and provide solutions to many important real-world scenarios. Though the essence in solving these two problem…
Change DetectionClusteringMulti-Armed BanditsOnline Clustering