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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…
We study the effects of approximate inference on the performance of Thompson sampling in the $k$-armed bandit problems. Thompson sampling is a successful algorithm for online decision-making but requires posterior inference, which often…
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…
This note introduce three Bayesian style Multi-armed bandit algorithms: Information-directed sampling, Thompson Sampling and Generalized Thompson Sampling. The goal is to give an intuitive explanation for these three algorithms and their…
Thompson sampling is a heuristic algorithm for the multi-armed bandit problem which has a long tradition in machine learning. The algorithm has a Bayesian spirit in the sense that it selects arms based on posterior samples of reward…
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…
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…
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…
Thompson Sampling is one of the most effective methods for contextual bandits and has been generalized to posterior sampling for certain MDP settings. However, existing posterior sampling methods for reinforcement learning are limited by…
We propose an extension of Thompson sampling to optimization problems over function spaces where the objective is a known functional of an unknown operator's output. We assume that queries to the operator (such as running a high-fidelity…
We study the combinatorial sleeping multi-armed semi-bandit problem with long-term fairness constraints~(CSMAB-F). To address the problem, we adopt Thompson Sampling~(TS) to maximize the total rewards and use virtual queue techniques to…
Thompson sampling provides a solution to bandit problems in which new observations are allocated to arms with the posterior probability that an arm is optimal. While sometimes easy to implement and asymptotically optimal, Thompson sampling…
This technical note presents a new approach to carrying out the kind of exploration achieved by Thompson sampling, but without explicitly maintaining or sampling from posterior distributions. The approach is based on a bootstrap technique…
Contextual bandits constitute a classical framework for decision-making under uncertainty. In this setting, the goal is to learn the arms of highest reward subject to contextual information, while the unknown reward parameters of each arm…
The empirically successful Thompson Sampling algorithm for stochastic bandits has drawn much interest in understanding its theoretical properties. One important benefit of the algorithm is that it allows domain knowledge to be conveniently…
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…
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…
We consider stochastic multi-armed bandit problems with complex actions over a set of basic arms, where the decision maker plays a complex action rather than a basic arm in each round. The reward of the complex action is some function of…
Thompson sampling is one of the most widely used algorithms for many online decision problems, due to its simplicity in implementation and superior empirical performance over other state-of-the-art methods. Despite its popularity and…
Thompson sampling is a popular algorithm for solving multi-armed bandit problems, and has been applied in a wide range of applications, from website design to portfolio optimization. In such applications, however, the number of choices (or…