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Francesco Bacchiocchi

11 accepted papers

2026

Learning in Bayesian Stackelberg Games With Unknown Follower's Types

ICML 2026poster

We study online learning in Bayesian Stackelberg games, where a leader repeatedly interacts with a follower whose unknown private type is independently drawn at each round from an unknown probability distribution. The goal is to design algorithms that minimize the leader's regret with respect to alw…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Contract Design Under Approximate Best Responses

ICML 2025poster

Principal-agent problems model scenarios where a principal aims at incentivizing an agent to take costly, unobservable actions through the provision of payments. Such interactions are ubiquitous in several real-world applications, ranging from blockchain to the delegation of machine learning tasks.…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Markov Persuasion Processes: Learning to Persuade From Scratch

NeurIPS 2025poster

In Bayesian persuasion, an informed sender strategically discloses information to a receiver so as to persuade them to undertake desirable actions. Recently, Markov persuasion processes (MPPs) have been introduced to capture sequential scenarios where a sender faces a stream of myopic receivers in a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Online Bilateral Trade With Minimal Feedback: Don’t Waste Seller’s Time

NeurIPS 2025poster

Online learning algorithms for designing optimal bilateral trade mechanisms have recently received significant attention. This paper addresses a key inefficiency in prior two-bit feedback models, which synchronously query both the buyer and the seller for their willingness to trade. This approach is…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

The Sample Complexity of Stackelberg Games

AISTATS 2025oral

Stackelberg games (SGs) constitute the most fundamental and acclaimed models of strategic interactions involving some form of commitment. Moreover, they form the basis of more elaborate models of this kind, such as, e.g., Bayesian persuasion and principal-agent problems. Addressing learning tasks in…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Autoregressive Bandits

AISTATS 2024poster

Autoregressive processes naturally arise in a large variety of real-world scenarios, including stock markets, sales forecasting, weather prediction, advertising, and pricing. When facing a sequential decision-making problem in such a context, the temporal dependence between consecutive observations…

2024

Bandits with Ranking Feedback

NeurIPS 2024poster

In this paper, we introduce a novel variation of multi-armed bandits called bandits with ranking feedback. Unlike traditional bandits, this variation provides feedback to the learner that allows them to rank the arms based on previous pulls, without quantifying numerically the difference in performa…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Learning Optimal Contracts: How to Exploit Small Action Spaces

ICLR 2024poster

We study principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme---called contract---in order to induce an agent to take a costly, unobservable action leading to favorable outcomes. We consider a generalization of the classical (single-round) version of the probl…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2024

Online Bayesian Persuasion Without a Clue

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

We study online Bayesian persuasion problems in which an informed sender repeatedly faces a receiver with the goal of influencing their behavior through the provision of payoff-relevant information. Previous works assume that the sender has knowledge about either the prior distribution over states o…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Online Learning with Off-Policy Feedback in Adversarial MDPs

IJCAI 2024poster

In this paper, we face the challenge of online learning in adversarial Markov decision processes with off-policy feedback. In this setting, the learner chooses a policy, but, differently from the traditional on-policy setting, the environment is explored by means of a different, fixed, and possibly…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2022

Public Signaling in Bayesian Ad Auctions

IJCAI 2022poster

We study signaling in Bayesian ad auctions, in which bidders' valuations depend on a random, unknown state of nature. The auction mechanism has complete knowledge of the actual state of nature, and it can send signals to bidders so as to disclose information about the state and increase revenue. For…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar