A Contextual Combinatorial Bandit Approach to Negotiation

Abstract
Learning effective negotiation strategies poses two key challenges: the exploration-exploitation dilemma and dealing with large action spaces. However, there is an absence of learning-based approaches that effectively address these challenges in negotiation. This paper introduces a comprehensive formulation to tackle various negotiation problems. Our approach leverages contextual combinatorial multi-armed bandits, with the bandits resolving the exploration-exploitation dilemma, and the combinatorial nature handles large action spaces. Building upon this formulation, we introduce NegUCB, a novel method that also handles common issues such as partial observations and complex reward functions in negotiation. NegUCB is contextual and tailored for full-bandit feedback without constraints on the reward functions. Under mild assumptions, it ensures a sub-linear regret upper bound. Experiments conducted on three negotiation tasks demonstrate the superiority of our approach.
Authors
Yexin Li, Zhancun Mu, Siyuan Qi†
Publication Year
2024
https://openreview.net/pdf?id=CBcNl5Eo32
Publication Venue
ICML
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