Tractable contextual bandits beyond realizability
SK Krishnamurthy, V Hadad… - … Conference on Artificial …, 2021 - proceedings.mlr.press
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 2021•proceedings.mlr.press
Tractable contextual bandit algorithms often rely on the realizability assumption–ie, that the
true expected reward model belongs to a known class, such as linear functions. In this work,
we present a tractable bandit algorithm that is not sensitive to the realizability assumption
and computationally reduces to solving a constrained regression problem in every epoch.
When realizability does not hold, our algorithm ensures the same guarantees on regret
achieved by realizability-based algorithms under realizability, up to an additive term that …
true expected reward model belongs to a known class, such as linear functions. In this work,
we present a tractable bandit algorithm that is not sensitive to the realizability assumption
and computationally reduces to solving a constrained regression problem in every epoch.
When realizability does not hold, our algorithm ensures the same guarantees on regret
achieved by realizability-based algorithms under realizability, up to an additive term that …
Abstract
Tractable contextual bandit algorithms often rely on the realizability assumption–ie, that the true expected reward model belongs to a known class, such as linear functions. In this work, we present a tractable bandit algorithm that is not sensitive to the realizability assumption and computationally reduces to solving a constrained regression problem in every epoch. When realizability does not hold, our algorithm ensures the same guarantees on regret achieved by realizability-based algorithms under realizability, up to an additive term that accounts for the misspecification error. This extra term is proportional to T times a function of the mean squared error between the best model in the class and the true model, where T is the total number of time-steps. Our work sheds light on the bias-variance trade-off for tractable contextual bandits. This trade-off is not captured by algorithms that assume realizability, since under this assumption there exists an estimator in the class that attains zero bias.
proceedings.mlr.press
Showing the best result for this search. See all results