Related papers: Sequential Monte Carlo Bandits
We extend Bayesian multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms beyond their original setting by making use of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods. A MAB is a sequential decision making problem where the goal is to learn a policy that maximizes…
Drawing a sample from a discrete distribution is one of the building components for Monte Carlo methods. Like other sampling algorithms, discrete sampling suffers from the high computational burden in large-scale inference problems. We…
We consider the problem of sequentially choosing between a set of unbiased Monte Carlo estimators to minimize the mean-squared-error (MSE) of a final combined estimate. By reducing this task to a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, we…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are widely used to sample from complicated distributions, especially to sample from the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference. However, MCMC is not directly applicable when facing the doubly…
In many problems, complex non-Gaussian and/or nonlinear models are required to accurately describe a physical system of interest. In such cases, Monte Carlo algorithms are remarkably flexible and extremely powerful approaches to solve such…
A key feature of sequential decision making under uncertainty is a need to balance between exploiting--choosing the best action according to the current knowledge, and exploring--obtaining information about values of other actions. The…
Motivated by problems of learning to rank long item sequences, we introduce a variant of the cascading bandit model that considers flexible length sequences with varying rewards and losses. We formulate two generative models for this…
Multi-task learning in contextual bandits has attracted significant research interest due to its potential to enhance decision-making across multiple related tasks by leveraging shared structures and task-specific heterogeneity. In this…
In recent years, multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework has attracted a lot of attention in various applications, from recommender systems and information retrieval to healthcare and finance, due to its stellar performance combined with certain…
Online learning in large-scale structured bandits is known to be challenging due to the curse of dimensionality. In this paper, we propose a unified meta-learning framework for a general class of structured bandit problems where the…
This paper introduces methodology for performing Bayesian inference sequentially on a sequence of posteriors on spaces of different dimensions. We show how this may be achieved through the use of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers (Del…
In a typical stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, the objective is often to maximize the expected sum of rewards over some time horizon $T$. While the choice of a strategy that accomplishes that is optimal with no additional information,…
This paper proposes a Sequential Monte Carlo approach for the Bayesian estimation of mixed causal and noncausal models. Unlike previous Bayesian estimation methods developed for these models, Sequential Monte Carlo offers extensive…
Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits is a well-known and accepted online optimization algorithm, that is used in many Web experiences to tailor content or presentation to users' traffic. Much has been published on theoretical guarantees (e.g.…
Multi-arm bandits are gaining popularity as they enable real-world sequential decision-making across application areas, including clinical trials, recommender systems, and online decision-making. Consequently, there is an increased desire…
Multi-armed bandits are a quintessential machine learning problem requiring the balancing of exploration and exploitation. While there has been progress in developing algorithms with strong theoretical guarantees, there has been less focus…
We study the problem of using causal models to improve the rate at which good interventions can be learned online in a stochastic environment. Our formalism combines multi-arm bandits and causal inference to model a novel type of bandit…
Sequential decision problems are often approximately solvable by simulating possible future action sequences. Metalevel decision procedures have been developed for selecting which action sequences to simulate, based on estimating the…
Contextual bandits are a form of multi-armed bandit in which the agent has access to predictive side information (known as the context) for each arm at each time step, and have been used to model personalized news recommendation, ad…
The celebrated Monte Carlo method estimates an expensive-to-compute quantity by random sampling. Bandit-based Monte Carlo optimization is a general technique for computing the minimum of many such expensive-to-compute quantities by adaptive…