{"id":574956,"date":"2019-02-05T09:00:43","date_gmt":"2019-02-05T17:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&#038;p=574956"},"modified":"2019-09-01T07:37:17","modified_gmt":"2019-09-01T14:37:17","slug":"contextual-bandits-with-continuous-actions-smoothing-zooming-and-adapting","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/contextual-bandits-with-continuous-actions-smoothing-zooming-and-adapting\/","title":{"rendered":"Contextual Bandits with Continuous Actions: Smoothing, Zooming, and Adapting"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We study contextual bandit learning with an abstract policy class and continuous action space. We obtain two qualitatively different regret bounds: one competes with a smoothed version of the policy class under no continuity assumptions, while the other requires standard Lipschitz assumptions. Both bounds exhibit data-dependent &#8220;zooming&#8221; behavior and, with no tuning, yield improved guarantees for benign problems. We also study adapting to unknown smoothness parameters, establishing a price-of-adaptivity and deriving optimal adaptive algorithms that require no additional information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We study contextual bandit learning with an abstract policy class and continuous action space. We obtain two qualitatively different regret bounds: one competes with a smoothed version of the policy class under no continuity assumptions, while the other requires standard Lipschitz assumptions. Both bounds exhibit data-dependent &#8220;zooming&#8221; behavior and, with no tuning, yield improved guarantees [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"Conference on Learning Theory","msr_doi":"","msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_mag_id":"","msr_pubmed_id":"","msr_other_authors":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_award":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_institution":"","msr_host":"","msr_version":"","msr_duration":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_s2_match_type":"","msr_citation_count_updated":"","msr_published_date":"2019-6-1","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_notes":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_conference_url":"","msr_journal_url":"","msr_s2_pdf_url":"","msr_year":0,"msr_citation_count":0,"msr_influential_citations":0,"msr_reference_count":0,"msr_s2_match_confidence":0,"msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":true,"msr_s2_open_access":false,"msr_s2_author_ids":[],"msr_pub_ids":[],"msr_hide_image_in_river":0,"footnotes":""},"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13556],"msr-publication-type":[193716],"msr-publisher":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-574956","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-artificial-intelligence","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2019-6-1","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"url","viewUrl":"false","id":"false","title":"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1902.01520","label_id":"243109","label":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_citation_count":0,"msr_citation_count_updated":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_influential_citations":0,"msr_reference_count":0,"msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_author_ids":[],"msr_s2_open_access":false,"msr_s2_pdf_url":null,"msr_attachments":[],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Akshay Krishnamurthy","user_id":30913,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Akshay Krishnamurthy"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"John Langford","user_id":32204,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=John Langford"},{"type":"text","value":"Aleksandrs Slivkins","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Chicheng Zhang","user_id":36870,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Chicheng Zhang"}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[199571],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[144902,395930],"msr_project":[568491],"publication":[],"video":[],"msr-tool":[],"msr_publication_type":"inproceedings","related_content":{"projects":[{"ID":568491,"post_title":"Real World Reinforcement Learning","post_name":"real-world-reinforcement-learning","post_type":"msr-project","post_date":"2019-05-03 10:02:09","post_modified":"2024-01-16 11:11:48","post_status":"publish","permalink":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/real-world-reinforcement-learning\/","post_excerpt":"The mission of Real World Reinforcement Learning (Real-World RL) team is to develop learning methods, from foundations to real world applications, to empower people and organizations to make better decisions. 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