Related papers: Generalized Thompson Sampling for Contextual Bandi…
Continuously learning and leveraging the knowledge accumulated from prior tasks in order to improve future performance is a long standing machine learning problem. In this paper, we study the problem in the multi-armed bandit framework with…
Contextual bandits are a core technology for personalized mobile health interventions, where decision-making requires adapting to complex, non-linear user behaviors. While Thompson Sampling (TS) is a preferred strategy for these problems,…
Recent growing adoption of experimentation in practice has led to a surge of attention to multiarmed bandits as a technique to reduce the opportunity cost of online experiments. In this setting, a decision-maker sequentially chooses among a…
We provide an approach for the analysis of randomised exploration algorithms like Thompson sampling that does not rely on forced optimism or posterior inflation. With this, we demonstrate that in the $d$-dimensional linear bandit setting,…
We introduce a novel anytime Batched Thompson sampling policy for multi-armed bandits where the agent observes the rewards of her actions and adjusts her policy only at the end of a small number of batches. We show that this policy…
In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective…
We study Thompson sampling (TS) in online decision making, where the uncertain environment is sampled from a mixture distribution. This is relevant in multi-task learning, where a learning agent faces different classes of problems. We…
I analyse the frequentist regret of the famous Gittins index strategy for multi-armed bandits with Gaussian noise and a finite horizon. Remarkably it turns out that this approach leads to finite-time regret guarantees comparable to those…
In stochastic contextual bandits, an agent sequentially makes actions from a time-dependent action set based on past experience to minimize the cumulative regret. Like many other machine learning algorithms, the performance of bandits…
We study the generalized linear bandit (GLB) problem, a contextual multi-armed bandit framework that extends the classical linear model by incorporating a non-linear link function, thereby modeling a broad class of reward distributions such…
We analyze the regret of combinatorial Thompson sampling (CTS) for the combinatorial multi-armed bandit with probabilistically triggered arms under the semi-bandit feedback setting. We assume that the learner has access to an exact…
Contextual multinomial logit (MNL) bandits capture many real-world assortment recommendation problems such as online retailing/advertising. However, prior work has only considered (generalized) linear value functions, which greatly limits…
Contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms have been shown promising for maximizing cumulative rewards in sequential decision tasks such as news article recommendation systems, web page ad placement algorithms, and mobile health.…
In this paper, we study the multi-objective bandits (MOB) problem, where a learner repeatedly selects one arm to play and then receives a reward vector consisting of multiple objectives. MOB has found many real-world applications as varied…
We present simple and efficient algorithms for the batched stochastic multi-armed bandit and batched stochastic linear bandit problems. We prove bounds for their expected regrets that improve over the best-known regret bounds for any number…
Thompson Sampling is a principled method for balancing exploration and exploitation, but its real-world adoption faces computational challenges in large-scale or non-conjugate settings. While ensemble-based approaches offer partial…
We consider a finite-horizon multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem in a Bayesian setting, for which we propose an information relaxation sampling framework. With this framework, we define an intuitive family of control policies that include…
Policy regret is a well established notion of measuring the performance of an online learning algorithm against an adaptive adversary. We study restrictions on the adversary that enable efficient minimization of the \emph{complete policy…
We study a stochastic bandit algorithm motivated by retry-aware objectives that value the best outcome among multiple attempts, such as pass@$k$ and max@$k$. Given a posterior over arm values, ReMax chooses a sampling distribution that…
Multi-armed bandit methods have been used for dynamic experiments particularly in online services. Among the methods, thompson sampling is widely used because it is simple but shows desirable performance. Many thompson sampling methods for…