Related papers: Freshness-Aware Thompson Sampling
Thompson Sampling has been widely used for contextual bandit problems due to the flexibility of its modeling power. However, a general theory for this class of methods in the frequentist setting is still lacking. In this paper, we present a…
In Reinforcement Learning (RL), multi-armed Bandit (MAB) problems have found applications across diverse domains such as recommender systems, healthcare, and finance. Traditional MAB algorithms typically assume stationary reward…
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…
When an AI system interacts with multiple users, it frequently needs to make allocation decisions. For instance, a virtual agent decides whom to pay attention to in a group setting, or a factory robot selects a worker to deliver a part.…
We develop a novel latent-bandit algorithm for tackling the cold-start problem for new users joining a recommender system. This new algorithm significantly outperforms the state of the art, simultaneously achieving both higher accuracy and…
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…
Consider a bandit algorithm that recommends actions to self-interested users in a recommendation system. The users are free to choose other actions and need to be incentivized to follow the algorithm's recommendations. While the users…
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…
We consider the multiarm bandit problems in the timevarying dynamic system for rich structural features. For the nonlinear dynamic model, we propose the approximate inference for the posterior distributions based on Laplace Approximation.…
In many biomedical, science, and engineering problems, one must sequentially decide which action to take next so as to maximize rewards. One general class of algorithms for optimizing interactions with the world, while simultaneously…
Multi-armed bandit algorithms have been argued for decades as useful for adaptively randomized experiments. In such experiments, an algorithm varies which arms (e.g. alternative interventions to help students learn) are assigned to…
Cold-start is a notoriously difficult problem which can occur in recommendation systems, and arises when there is insufficient information to draw inferences for users or items. To address this challenge, a contextual bandit algorithm --…
Sequential recommendation aims to predict the next item a user is likely to prefer based on their sequential interaction history. Recently, text-based sequential recommendation has emerged as a promising paradigm that uses pre-trained…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a ubiquitous decision-making problem that exemplifies exploration-exploitation tradeoff. Standard formulations exclude risk in decision making. Risknotably complicates the basic reward-maximising…
In recent years, instructional practices in Operations Research (OR), Management Science (MS), and Analytics have increasingly shifted toward digital environments, where large and diverse groups of learners make it difficult to provide…
Optimizing news headlines is important for publishers and media sites. A compelling headline will increase readership, user engagement and social shares. At Yahoo Front Page, headline testing is carried out using a test-rollout strategy: we…
To maintain the accuracy of supervised learning models in the presence of evolving data streams, we provide temporally-biased sampling schemes that weight recent data most heavily, with inclusion probabilities for a given data item decaying…
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…
How can we make use of information parallelism in online decision making problems while efficiently balancing the exploration-exploitation trade-off? In this paper, we introduce a batch Thompson Sampling framework for two canonical online…
Designing efficient exploration is central to Reinforcement Learning due to the fundamental problem posed by the exploration-exploitation dilemma. Bayesian exploration strategies like Thompson Sampling resolve this trade-off in a principled…