AI & ML
Exploiting Concavity Information in Gaussian Process Contextual Bandit Optimization
arXiv stat.ML0 views
arXiv:2503.10836v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The contextual bandit models sequential decision-making problems in which rewards depend on both the chosen action and observed context. In many domains such as medicine, business, and engineering, prior knowledge provides structural information about the reward function that can be exploited to improve optimization efficiency. This paper studies settings where, for each observable context, the conditional mean reward is known to be concave with respect to the action variable. To leverage this structure, we develop a contextual bandit algorithm that conditions a Bayesian Gaussian Process posterior on concavity constraints. We propose a novel reward model that combines a concavity-preserving regression spline basis with a constrained GP posterior, yielding a tractable shape-constrained estimator. Building on this model, we construct a UCB algorithm and establish new posterior concentration inequalities for the constrained posterior, leading to regret guarantees that are never worse than applying standard GP-UCB without concavity information and can be strictly tighter when concavity is informative. Experiments on benchmark problems and a Warfarin dosing test application demonstrate substantial reductions in cumulative regret relative to state-of-the-art baselines.
Source:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10836PreviousThe role of locality and weight sharing in convolutional neural networksNextThe Sample Complexity of Multiple Change Point Identification under Bandit Feedback
Related posts
I Launched My Company Website, Made Task Monitor Free, and Opened Custom Project Requests
0dev.to AI
How I turn Hacker News, GitHub and npm into product ideas every 3 hours
0dev.to AI
Lenovo's 'Encrypted' Fingerprint USB Drive Is an SD Card. How to Check Yours
0dev.to Linux

Email: OpenAI plans to merge ChatGPT's Chat and Work tabs on desktop, rolling out to select users before a wider release; Codex remains a separate experience (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
0Techmeme

Memo: Alphabet is issuing €6B in euro-denominated debt across seven tranches, attracting €17B+ of demand; the company sold €9B of bonds earlier in 2026 (Reuters)
0Techmeme

S-1: Anthropic reports Q3 revenue up 12x YoY to nearly $17B, a net loss of $23.3B, up from $12.1B in Q3 2025, and operating expenses up 292% to $17.5B (Bailey Lipschultz/Bloomberg)
0Techmeme