Related papers: Thompson sampling with the online bootstrap
Reinforcement learning studies how to balance exploration and exploitation in real-world systems, optimizing interactions with the world while simultaneously learning how the world operates. One general class of algorithms for such learning…
Thompson Sampling, one of the oldest heuristics for solving multi-armed bandits, has recently been shown to demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. The empirical success has led to great interests in theoretical understanding of this…
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 this paper we study a multi-arm bandit problem in which the quality of each arm is measured by the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) at some level alpha of the reward distribution. While existing works in this setting mainly focus on…
Thompson sampling (TS) is a popular heuristic for action selection, but it requires sampling from a posterior distribution. Unfortunately, this can become computationally intractable in complex environments, such as those modeled using…
Stochastic Rank-One Bandits (Katarya et al, (2017a,b)) are a simple framework for regret minimization problems over rank-one matrices of arms. The initially proposed algorithms are proved to have logarithmic regret, but do not match the…
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…
Most existing approximate Thompson Sampling (TS) algorithms for multi-armed bandits use Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) or its variants in each round to sample from the posterior, relaxing the need for conjugacy assumptions…
We propose a novel framework for structured bandits, which we call an influence diagram bandit. Our framework captures complex statistical dependencies between actions, latent variables, and observations; and thus unifies and extends many…
We study the asymptotic performance of the Thompson sampling algorithm in the batched multi-armed bandit setting where the time horizon $T$ is divided into batches, and the agent is not able to observe the rewards of her actions until the…
The PhD thesis of Maillard (2013) presents a rather obscure algorithm for the $K$-armed bandit problem. This less-known algorithm, which we call Maillard sampling (MS), computes the probability of choosing each arm in a \textit{closed…
This paper unifies the design and the analysis of risk-averse Thompson sampling algorithms for the multi-armed bandit problem for a class of risk functionals $\rho$ that are continuous and dominant. We prove generalised concentration bounds…
With the availability of big medical image data, the selection of an adequate training set is becoming more important to address the heterogeneity of different datasets. Simply including all the data does not only incur high processing…
How to explore efficiently is a central problem in multi-armed bandits. In this paper, we introduce the metadata-based multi-task bandit problem, where the agent needs to solve a large number of related multi-armed bandit tasks and can…
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…
This paper studies the fixed-confidence best arm identification (BAI) problem in the bandit framework in the canonical single-parameter exponential models. For this problem, many policies have been proposed, but most of them require solving…
During online decision making in Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB), one needs to conduct inference on the true mean reward of each arm based on data collected so far at each step. However, since the arms are adaptively selected--thereby yielding…
In many real-world problems of real-time monitoring high-dimensional streaming data, one wants to detect an undesired event or change quickly once it occurs, but under the sampling control constraint in the sense that one might be able to…
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 $T \le 288 e^{64}$,…
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…