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Thompson sampling (TS) is a Bayesian randomized exploration strategy that samples options (e.g., system parameters or control laws) from the current posterior and then applies the selected option that is optimal for a task, thereby…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Kaikai Zheng , Dawei Shi , Yang Shi , Long Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Yueyang Liu , Xu Kuang , Benjamin Van Roy

When applying aggregating strategies to Prediction with Expert Advice, the learning rate must be adaptively tuned. The natural choice of sqrt(complexity/current loss) renders the analysis of Weighted Majority derivatives quite complicated.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Marcus Hutter , Jan Poland

Contextual multi-armed bandits are classical models in reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making associated with individual information. A widely-used policy for bandits is Thompson Sampling, where samples from a data-driven…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-30 Hongju Park , Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh

Thompson sampling for multi-armed bandit problems is known to enjoy favorable performance in both theory and practice. However, it suffers from a significant limitation computationally, arising from the need for samples from posterior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Eric Mazumdar , Aldo Pacchiano , Yi-an Ma , Peter L. Bartlett , Michael I. Jordan

We investigate the extent to which offline demonstration data can improve online learning. It is natural to expect some improvement, but the question is how, and by how much? We show that the degree of improvement must depend on the quality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-18 Botao Hao , Rahul Jain , Tor Lattimore , Benjamin Van Roy , Zheng Wen

In the online learning with experts problem, an algorithm must make a prediction about an outcome on each of $T$ days (or times), given a set of $n$ experts who make predictions on each day (or time). The algorithm is given feedback on the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-03-06 David P. Woodruff , Fred Zhang , Samson Zhou

Decision Trees are prominent prediction models for interpretable Machine Learning. They have been thoroughly researched, mostly in the batch setting with a fixed labelled dataset, leading to popular algorithms such as C4.5, ID3 and CART.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Ayman Chaouki , Jesse Read , Albert Bifet

Bayesian optimization through Gaussian process regression is an effective method of optimizing an unknown function for which every measurement is expensive. It approximates the objective function and then recommends a new measurement point…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-05-17 Hildo Bijl , Thomas B. Schön , Jan-Willem van Wingerden , Michel Verhaegen

We derive an alternative proof for the regret of Thompson sampling (\ts) in the stochastic linear bandit setting. While we obtain a regret bound of order $\widetilde{O}(d^{3/2}\sqrt{T})$ as in previous results, the proof sheds new light on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-06 Marc Abeille , Alessandro Lazaric

This paper considers the use of a simple posterior sampling algorithm to balance between exploration and exploitation when learning to optimize actions such as in multi-armed bandit problems. The algorithm, also known as Thompson Sampling,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-04 Daniel Russo , Benjamin Van Roy

Adaptive experimentation is increasingly used in educational platforms to personalize learning through dynamic content and feedback. However, standard adaptive strategies such as Thompson Sampling often underperform in real-world…

Thompson Sampling is one of the most effective methods for contextual bandits and has been generalized to posterior sampling for certain MDP settings. However, existing posterior sampling methods for reinforcement learning are limited by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-24 Christoph Dann , Mehryar Mohri , Tong Zhang , Julian Zimmert

We study Gaussian Process Thompson Sampling (GP-TS) for sequential decision-making over compact, continuous action spaces and provide a frequentist regret analysis based on fractional Gaussian process posteriors, without relying on domain…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-17 Somjit Roy , Prateek Jaiswal , Anirban Bhattacharya , Debdeep Pati , Bani K. Mallick

Preference feedback, in the form of pairwise comparisons rather than scalar scores, has seen increasing use in applications such as human-, laboratory-, and expert-in-the-loop design, as well as scientific discovery. We propose a Thompson…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-29 Joseph Lazzaro , Davide Buffelli , Da-shan Shiu , Sattar Vakili

Ensemble sampling serves as a practical approximation to Thompson sampling when maintaining an exact posterior distribution over model parameters is computationally intractable. In this paper, we establish a regret bound that ensures…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Chao Qin , Zheng Wen , Xiuyuan Lu , Benjamin Van Roy

Thompson Sampling is one of the oldest heuristics for multi-armed bandit problems. It is a randomized algorithm based on Bayesian ideas, and has recently generated significant interest after several studies demonstrated it to have better…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-09-18 Shipra Agrawal , Navin Goyal

In this paper, we consider online learning in generalized linear contextual bandits where rewards are not immediately observed. Instead, rewards are available to the decision-maker only after some delay, which is unknown and stochastic. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-12 Jose Blanchet , Renyuan Xu , Zhengyuan Zhou

For each of $T$ time steps, $m$ experts report probability distributions over $n$ outcomes; we wish to learn to aggregate these forecasts in a way that attains a no-regret guarantee. We focus on the fundamental and practical aggregation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Eric Neyman , Tim Roughgarden

Generative flow networks (GFlowNets) are amortized variational inference algorithms that treat sampling from a distribution over compositional objects as a sequential decision-making problem with a learnable action policy. Unlike other…