让马尔可夫上下文的线性 bandit 变得廉价,提升实际应用效果。
Mixing Makes Markovian Contexts Cheap for Linear Bandits
- 用平稳替代动作集和延迟更新,解决非平稳上下文偏差问题。
- 在快速混合条件下,后悔上界与标准线性 bandit 一致。
- 适用于上下文有时间相关性的实际场景,如资源调度、推荐系统。
当上下文独立同分布时,线性上下文 bandit 可简化为单上下文情形,从而获得更紧的有限时间分析,并复用成熟技术。然而这一简化依赖于上下文独立性,无法推广到具有时间相关性(如马尔可夫)的场景,而后者在实践中常见。本文针对上下文通过外生马尔可夫链演化的情形,提出一种在统一几何遍历性假设下的新归约方法。通过构建平稳的替代动作集并采用延迟更新策略,控制非平稳条件分布带来的偏差。进一步设计了针对未知平稳分布的分阶段算法,在线学习替代映射。两种设置下均得到高概率最坏情况后悔界,与底层线性 bandit oracle 的表现一致,且在真实数据集上验证了优于 LinUCB 的实际收益。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Recent work shows that when contexts are drawn i.i.d., linear contextual bandits can be reduced to single-context linear bandits. This ``contexts are cheap'' perspective is highly advantageous, as it allows for sharper finite-time analyses and leverages mature techniques from the linear bandit literature, such as those for misspecification and adversarial corruption. However, this reduction crucially relies on the independence of contexts and does not extend to settings with temporally correlated (e.g., Markovian) contexts, which arise frequently in practice. Motivated by applications with temporally correlated availability, we extend this perspective to linear bandits with Markovian context processes, where the action set evolves via an exogenous Markov chain. Our main contribution is a reduction that applies under uniform geometric ergodicity. We construct a stationary surrogate action set to solve the problem using a standard linear bandit oracle, employing a delayed-update scheme to control the bias induced by the nonstationary conditional context distributions. We further provide a phased algorithm for unknown stationary distributions that learns the surrogate mapping online. In both settings, we obtain a high-probability worst-case regret bound matching that of the underlying linear bandit oracle in sufficiently fast mixing regimes. We then validate our results on a real-world instance, where we show practical gains over a LinUCB baseline.
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