8 accepted papers
We study contextual online pricing with biased offline data. For the scalar price elasticity case, we identify the instance-dependent quantity $\delta^2$ that measures how far the offline data lies from the (unknown) online optimum. We show that the time length $T$, bias bound $V$, size $N$ and di…
E-bikes (EBs) are a key transportation mode in urban area, especially for couriers of delivery platforms, but underdeveloped EB systems can hinder courier's productivity due to limited battery capacity. Battery-swapping stations address this issue by enabling riders to exchange depleted batteries fo
Motivated by the concept of satisficing in decision-making, we consider the problem of satisficing exploration in bandit optimization. In this setting, the learner aims at finding a satisficing arm whose mean reward exceeds a certain threshold. The performance is measured by satisficing regret, whic…
Motivated by practical needs in online experimentation and off-policy learning, we study the problem of safe optimal design, where we develop a data logging policy that efficiently explores while achieving competitive rewards with a baseline production policy. We first show, perhaps surprisingly, th…
We consider model-free reinforcement learning (RL) in non-stationary Markov decision processes. Both the reward functions and the state transition functions are allowed to vary arbitrarily over time as long as their cumulative variations do not exceed certain variation budgets. We propose Restarted…
We consider un-discounted reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under drifting non-stationarity, \ie, both the reward and state transition distributions are allowed to evolve over time, as long as their respective total variations, quantified by suitable metrics, do not exc…
We introduce algorithms that achieve state-of-the-art dynamic regret bounds for non-stationary linear stochastic bandit setting. It captures natural applications such as dynamic pricing and ads allocation in a changing environment. We show how the difficulty posed by the non-stationarity can be over…
We consider the \emph{Threshold Bandit} setting, a variant of the classical multi-armed bandit problem in which the reward on each round depends on a piece of side information known as a \emph{threshold value}. The learner selects one of $K$ actions (arms), this action generates a random sample from…