Linear Contextual Bandits With Interference

Interference, a key concept in causal inference, extends the reward modeling process by accounting for the impact of one unit’s actions on the rewards of others. In contextual bandit (CB) settings where multiple units are present in the same round, interference can significantly affect the estimation of expected rewards for different arms, thereby influencing the decision-making process. Although some prior work has explored multi-agent and adversarial bandits in interference-aware settings, how to model interference in CB remains significantly underexplored. In this paper, we introduce a systematic framework to address interference in Linear CB (LinCB), bridging the gap between causal inference and online decision-making. We propose a series of algorithms that explicitly quantify the interference effect in the reward modeling process and provide comprehensive theoretical guarantees, including sublinear regret bounds, finite sample upper bounds, and asymptotic properties. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through simulations and a synthetic data generated based on MovieLens data.

Authors

• Yang Xu 0089
• Wenbin Lu
• Rui Song 0006

Keywords

• Contextual Bandits
• Interference
• Causality
• Multi-agent
• Asymptotics
• Sublinear regret