Related papers: Thompson Sampling in Dynamic Systems for Contextua…
Posterior sampling in contextual bandits with a Gaussian prior can be implemented exactly or approximately using the Laplace approximation. The Gaussian prior is computationally efficient but it cannot describe complex distributions. In…
Thompson Sampling (TS) is one of the most effective algorithms for solving contextual multi-armed bandit problems. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, called Neural Thompson Sampling, which adapts deep neural networks for both…
Thompson Sampling has recently been shown to be optimal in the Bernoulli Multi-Armed Bandit setting[Kaufmann et al., 2012]. This bandit problem assumes stationary distributions for the rewards. It is often unrealistic to model the real…
Contextual multi-armed bandit problems arise frequently in important industrial applications. Existing solutions model the context either linearly, which enables uncertainty driven (principled) exploration, or non-linearly, by using…
Many efficient algorithms with strong theoretical guarantees have been proposed for the contextual multi-armed bandit problem. However, applying these algorithms in practice can be difficult because they require domain expertise to build…
Thompson sampling has proven effective across a wide range of stationary bandit environments. However, as we demonstrate in this paper, it can perform poorly when applied to non-stationary environments. We attribute such failures to the…
Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have made significant strides in performance on applications such as Go and Atari games. However, developing practical methods to balance exploration and exploitation in complex domains remains…
The multi-armed bandit problem is a popular model for studying exploration/exploitation trade-off in sequential decision problems. Many algorithms are now available for this well-studied problem. One of the earliest algorithms, given by W.…
Thompson sampling, a Bayesian method for balancing exploration and exploitation in bandit problems, has theoretical guarantees and exhibits strong empirical performance in many domains. Traditional Thompson sampling, however, assumes…
Contextual bandits are widely-used in the study of learning-based control policies for finite action spaces. While the problem is well-studied for bandits with perfectly observed context vectors, little is known about the case of…
As cellular networks become denser, a scalable and dynamic tuning of wireless base station parameters can only be achieved through automated optimization. Although the contextual bandit framework arises as a natural candidate for such a…
We study the problem of finding the optimal dosage in early stage clinical trials through the multi-armed bandit lens. We advocate the use of the Thompson Sampling principle, a flexible algorithm that can accommodate different types of…
In this work, we initiate the idea of using denoising diffusion models to learn priors for online decision making problems. Our special focus is on the meta-learning for bandit framework, with the goal of learning a strategy that performs…
We consider applying multi-armed bandits to model-assisted designs for dose-finding clinical trials. Multi-armed bandits are very simple and powerful methods to determine actions to maximize a reward in a limited number of trials. Among the…
Thompson sampling provides a solution to bandit problems in which new observations are allocated to arms with the posterior probability that an arm is optimal. While sometimes easy to implement and asymptotically optimal, Thompson sampling…
We study the process-level dynamics of Thompson sampling and related sampling-based bandit algorithms in the ``small gap'' regime, where the gaps between the arm means are of order $\sqrt{\gamma}$ or smaller and the time horizon is of order…
In this paper we consider the contextual multi-armed bandit problem for linear payoffs under a risk-averse criterion. At each round, contexts are revealed for each arm, and the decision maker chooses one arm to pull and receives the…
The dueling bandits problem is an online learning framework for learning from pairwise preference feedback, and is particularly well-suited for modeling settings that elicit subjective or implicit human feedback. In this paper, we study the…
Thompson Sampling, one of the oldest heuristics for solving multi-armed bandits, has recently been shown to demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. The empirical success has led to great interests in theoretical understanding of this…
We consider a sequential subset selection problem under parameter uncertainty, where at each time step, the decision maker selects a subset of cardinality $K$ from $N$ possible items (arms), and observes a (bandit) feedback in the form of…