Strategic Linear Contextual Bandits

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Buening, Thomas Kleine, Saha, Aadirupa, Dimitrakakis, Christos, Xu, Haifeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Buening, Thomas Kleine
Saha, Aadirupa
Dimitrakakis, Christos
Xu, Haifeng
author_facet Buening, Thomas Kleine
Saha, Aadirupa
Dimitrakakis, Christos
Xu, Haifeng
contents Motivated by the phenomenon of strategic agents gaming a recommender system to maximize the number of times they are recommended to users, we study a strategic variant of the linear contextual bandit problem, where the arms can strategically misreport privately observed contexts to the learner. We treat the algorithm design problem as one of mechanism design under uncertainty and propose the Optimistic Grim Trigger Mechanism (OptGTM) that incentivizes the agents (i.e., arms) to report their contexts truthfully while simultaneously minimizing regret. We also show that failing to account for the strategic nature of the agents results in linear regret. However, a trade-off between mechanism design and regret minimization appears to be unavoidable. More broadly, this work aims to provide insight into the intersection of online learning and mechanism design.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_00551
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Strategic Linear Contextual Bandits
Buening, Thomas Kleine
Saha, Aadirupa
Dimitrakakis, Christos
Xu, Haifeng
Machine Learning
Computer Science and Game Theory
Motivated by the phenomenon of strategic agents gaming a recommender system to maximize the number of times they are recommended to users, we study a strategic variant of the linear contextual bandit problem, where the arms can strategically misreport privately observed contexts to the learner. We treat the algorithm design problem as one of mechanism design under uncertainty and propose the Optimistic Grim Trigger Mechanism (OptGTM) that incentivizes the agents (i.e., arms) to report their contexts truthfully while simultaneously minimizing regret. We also show that failing to account for the strategic nature of the agents results in linear regret. However, a trade-off between mechanism design and regret minimization appears to be unavoidable. More broadly, this work aims to provide insight into the intersection of online learning and mechanism design.
title Strategic Linear Contextual Bandits
topic Machine Learning
Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.00551