Related papers: Thompson sampling with the online bootstrap

Online decision making plays a crucial role in numerous real-world applications. In many scenarios, the decision is made based on performing a sequence of tests on the incoming data points. However, performing all tests can be expensive and…

In this paper we consider Thompson Sampling (TS) for combinatorial semi-bandits. We demonstrate that, perhaps surprisingly, TS is sub-optimal for this problem in the sense that its regret scales exponentially in the ambient dimension, and…

We consider incentivized exploration: a version of multi-armed bandits where the choice of arms is controlled by self-interested agents, and the algorithm can only issue recommendations. The algorithm controls the flow of information, and…

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…

Contextual bandits are incredibly useful in many practical problems. We go one step further by devising a more realistic problem that combines: (1) contextual bandits with dense arm features, (2) non-linear reward functions, and (3) 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…

Users of recommender systems often behave in a non-stationary fashion, due to their evolving preferences and tastes over time. In this work, we propose a practical approach for fast personalization to non-stationary users. The key idea is…

We design and analyse variations of the classical Thompson sampling (TS) procedure for Bayesian optimisation (BO) in settings where function evaluations are expensive, but can be performed in parallel. Our theoretical analysis shows that a…

We study the efficiency of Thompson sampling for contextual bandits. Existing Thompson sampling-based algorithms need to construct a Laplace approximation (i.e., a Gaussian distribution) of the posterior distribution, which is inefficient…

Thompson sampling is a widely used strategy for contextual bandits: at each round, it samples a reward function from a Bayesian posterior and acts greedily under that sample. Prior-data fitted networks (PFNs), such as TabPFN v2+ and TabICL…

Mobile health (mHealth) interventions often aim to improve distal outcomes, such as clinical conditions, by optimizing proximal outcomes through just-in-time adaptive interventions. Contextual bandits provide a suitable framework for…

This paper considers the problem of online clustering with bandit feedback. A set of arms (or items) can be partitioned into various groups that are unknown. Within each group, the observations associated to each of the arms follow the same…

Thompson sampling has been shown to be an effective policy across a variety of online learning tasks. Many works have analyzed the finite time performance of Thompson sampling, and proved that it achieves a sub-linear regret under a broad…

This paper studies the Bayesian regret of the Thompson Sampling algorithm for bandit problems, building on the information-theoretic framework introduced by Russo and Van Roy (2015). Specifically, it extends the rate-distortion analysis of…

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…

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…

We consider a sequential subset selection problem under parameter uncertainty, where at each time step, the decision maker selects a subset of cardinality $K$ from $N$ possible items (arms), and observes a (bandit) feedback in the form of…

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…

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.…

Thompson sampling has impressive empirical performance for many multi-armed bandit problems. But current algorithms for Thompson sampling only work for the case of conjugate priors since these algorithms require to infer the posterior,…