Related papers: Optimality of Thompson Sampling for Gaussian Bandi…
In the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, a randomized probability matching policy called Thompson sampling (TS) has shown excellent performance in various reward models. In addition to the empirical performance, TS has been shown to…
Thompson sampling (TS) has been known for its outstanding empirical performance supported by theoretical guarantees across various reward models in the classical stochastic multi-armed bandit problems. Nonetheless, its optimality is often…
Restless bandit problems are instances of non-stationary multi-armed bandits. These problems have been studied well from the optimization perspective, where the goal is to efficiently find a near-optimal policy when system parameters are…
We consider Thompson sampling for linear bandit problems with finitely many independent arms, where rewards are sampled from normal distributions that are linearly dependent on unknown parameter vectors and with unknown variance.…
We consider the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with a prior distribution on the reward distributions. We are interested in studying prior-free and prior-dependent regret bounds, very much in the same spirit as the usual…
Thompson sampling (TS) is widely used for stochastic multi-armed bandits, yet its inferential properties under adaptive data collection are subtle. Classical asymptotic theory for sample means can fail because arm-specific sample sizes are…
Thompson sampling (TS) is one of the most popular and earliest algorithms to solve stochastic multi-armed bandit problems. We consider a variant of TS, named $\alpha$-TS, where we use a fractional or $\alpha$-posterior ($\alpha\in(0,1)$)…
Motivated by the pressing need for efficient optimization in online recommender systems, we revisit the cascading bandit model proposed by Kveton et al. (2015). While Thompson sampling (TS) algorithms have been shown to be empirically…
Thompson Sampling provides an efficient technique to introduce prior knowledge in the multi-armed bandit problem, along with providing remarkable empirical performance. In this paper, we revisit the Thompson Sampling algorithm under rewards…
We propose ${\tt AdaTS}$, a Thompson sampling algorithm that adapts sequentially to bandit tasks that it interacts with. The key idea in ${\tt AdaTS}$ is to adapt to an unknown task prior distribution by maintaining a distribution over its…
Gaussian process (GP) bandits provide a powerful framework for performing blackbox optimization of unknown functions. The characteristics of the unknown function depend heavily on the assumed GP prior. Most work in the literature assume…
Non-stationary multi-armed bandit (NS-MAB) problems have recently received significant attention. NS-MAB are typically modelled in two scenarios: abruptly changing, where reward distributions remain constant for a certain period and change…
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…
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…
We study Thompson Sampling-based algorithms for stochastic bandits with bounded rewards. As the existing problem-dependent regret bound for Thompson Sampling with Gaussian priors [Agrawal and Goyal, 2017] is vacuous when $T \le 288 e^{64}$,…
Much of the recent literature on bandit learning focuses on algorithms that aim to converge on an optimal action. One shortcoming is that this orientation does not account for time sensitivity, which can play a crucial role when learning an…
We investigate stochastic combinatorial multi-armed bandit with semi-bandit feedback (CMAB). In CMAB, the question of the existence of an efficient policy with an optimal asymptotic regret (up to a factor poly-logarithmic with the action…
In this paper we propose a general methodology to derive regret bounds for randomized multi-armed bandit algorithms. It consists in checking a set of sufficient conditions on the sampling probability of each arm and on the family of…
We consider the multi armed bandit problem in non-stationary environments. Based on the Bayesian method, we propose a variant of Thompson Sampling which can be used in both rested and restless bandit scenarios. Applying discounting to the…
Thompson Sampling has been demonstrated in many complex bandit models, however the theoretical guarantees available for the parametric multi-armed bandit are still limited to the Bernoulli case. Here we extend them by proving asymptotic…