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The stochastic multi-armed bandit setting has been recently studied in the nonstationary regime, where the mean payoff of each action is a non-decreasing function of the number of rounds passed since it was last played. This model captures natural behavioral aspects of the users which crucially determine the performance of recommendation platforms, ad placement systems, and more.
Cambridge University wins rowing trademark case
The University of Cambridge has won its fight to stop a rowing company based in the city trademarking its name. It argued Cambridge Rowing Limited would be able to take unfair advantage of and cause detriment to the university's reputation if its logo was registered. The university owns trademarks for the word Cambridge, meaning it has the right to stop others from using it in certain circumstances. Omar Terywall, the company's founder, said he was gutted at the outcome and the case had been a terrifying ordeal. He said he hoped to appeal the decision by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO).
EfficientFirst-OrderContextualBandits: Prediction,Allocation,andTriangularDiscrimination
On the technical side, we show that the logarithmic loss and an informationtheoretic quantity called thetriangular discriminationplay a fundamental role in obtaining first-order guarantees, and we combine this observation with new refinements tothe regression oracle reduction framework ofFoster and Rakhlin [29].