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Poster

Nonstochastic Contextual Combinatorial Bandits

Lukas Zierahn · Dirk van der Hoeven · Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi · Gergely Neu

Auditorium 1 Foyer 62

Abstract: We study a contextual version of online combinatorial optimisation with full and semi-bandit feedback. In this sequential decision-making problem, an online learner has to select an action from a combinatorial decision space after seeing a vector-valued context in each round. As a result of its action, the learner incurs a loss that is a bilinear function of the context vector and the vector representation of the chosen action. We consider two natural versions of the problem: semi-bandit where the losses are revealed for each component appearing in the learner's combinatorial action, and full-bandit where only the total loss is observed. We design computationally efficient algorithms based on a new loss estimator that takes advantage of the special structure of the problem, and show regret bounds order $\sqrt{T}$ with respect to the time horizon. The bounds demonstrate polynomial scaling with the relevant problem parameters which is shown to be nearly optimal. The theoretical results are complemented by a set of experiments on simulated data.

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