Related papers: Thompson sampling with the online bootstrap
In linear contextual bandits, the objective is to select actions that maximize cumulative rewards, modeled as a linear function with unknown parameters. Although Thompson Sampling performs well empirically, it does not achieve optimal…
The bootstrap is a method for estimating the distribution of an estimator or test statistic by re-sampling the data or a model estimated from the data. Under conditions that hold in a wide variety of econometric applications, the bootstrap…
Cold-start exploration is a core challenge in large-scale recommender systems: new or data-sparse items must receive traffic to estimate value, but over-exploration harms users and wastes impressions. In practice, Thompson Sampling (TS) is…
We introduce Dirichlet Process Posterior Sampling (DPPS), a Bayesian non-parametric algorithm for multi-arm bandits based on Dirichlet Process (DP) priors. Like Thompson-sampling, DPPS is a probability-matching algorithm, i.e., it plays an…
This paper studies the stochastic linear bandit problem, where a decision-maker chooses actions from possibly time-dependent sets of vectors in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and receives noisy rewards. The objective is to minimize regret, the difference…
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…
This paper investigates the best arm identification (BAI) problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits in the fixed confidence setting. The general class of the exponential family of bandits is considered. The existing algorithms for the…
Recently, it has been shown how sampling actions from the predictive distribution over the optimal action-sometimes called Thompson sampling-can be applied to solve sequential adaptive control problems, when the optimal policy is known for…
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…
We study the problem of best-arm identification with fixed confidence in stochastic linear bandits. The objective is to identify the best arm with a given level of certainty while minimizing the sampling budget. We devise a simple algorithm…
We consider a novel formulation of the multi-armed bandit model, which we call the contextual bandit with restricted context, where only a limited number of features can be accessed by the learner at every iteration. This novel formulation…
Bayesian optimization in large unstructured discrete spaces is often hindered by the computational cost of maximizing acquisition functions due to the absence of gradients. We propose a scalable alternative based on Thompson sampling that…
We study best arm identification in a variant of the multi-armed bandit problem where the learner has limited precision in arm selection. The learner can only sample arms via certain exploration bundles, which we refer to as boxes. In…
We study a novel pure exploration problem: the $\epsilon$-Thresholding Bandit Problem (TBP) with fixed confidence in stochastic linear bandits. We prove a lower bound for the sample complexity and extend an algorithm designed for Best Arm…
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…
Top Two algorithms arose as an adaptation of Thompson sampling to best arm identification in multi-armed bandit models (Russo, 2016), for parametric families of arms. They select the next arm to sample from by randomizing among two…
We consider the problem of adaptively placing sensors along an interval to detect stochastically-generated events. We present a new formulation of the problem as a continuum-armed bandit problem with feedback in the form of partial…
Approximate Thompson sampling with Langevin Monte Carlo broadens its reach from Gaussian posterior sampling to encompass more general smooth posteriors. However, it still encounters scalability issues in high-dimensional problems when…
Adam is a widely used optimizer in neural network training due to its adaptive learning rate. However, because different data samples influence model updates to varying degrees, treating them equally can lead to inefficient convergence. To…
In this paper, we propose a novel perturbation-based exploration method in bandit algorithms with bounded or unbounded rewards, called residual bootstrap exploration (\texttt{ReBoot}). The \texttt{ReBoot} enforces exploration by injecting…