Related papers: Racing Thompson: an Efficient Algorithm for Thomps…
We propose an efficient way to sample from a class of structured multivariate Gaussian distributions which routinely arise as conditional posteriors of model parameters that are assigned a conditionally Gaussian prior. The proposed…
We study the regret of Thompson sampling (TS) algorithms for exponential family bandits, where the reward distribution is from a one-dimensional exponential family, which covers many common reward distributions including Bernoulli,…
This paper studies regret minimization in a multi-armed bandit. It is well known that side information, such as the prior distribution of arm means in Thompson sampling, can improve the statistical efficiency of the bandit algorithm. While…
A Top Two sampling rule for bandit identification is a method which selects the next arm to sample from among two candidate arms, a leader and a challenger. Due to their simplicity and good empirical performance, they have received…
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…
Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to improve the performance of a primary task by jointly learning with related auxiliary tasks. Traditional MTL methods select tasks randomly during training. However, both previous studies and our results…
The long runtime associated with simulating multidisciplinary systems challenges the use of Bayesian optimization for multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO). This is particularly the case if the coupled system is modeled in a…
We consider a continuous-time multi-arm bandit problem (CTMAB), where the learner can sample arms any number of times in a given interval and obtain a random reward from each sample, however, increasing the frequency of sampling incurs an…
Multiple hypothesis testing is widely used to evaluate scientific studies involving statistical tests. However, for many of these tests, p-values are not available and are thus often approximated using Monte Carlo tests such as permutation…
In Bayesian optimization, Thompson sampling selects the evaluation point by sampling from the posterior distribution over the objective function maximizer. Because this sampling problem is intractable for Gaussian process (GP) surrogates,…
We study the combinatorial pure exploration problem Best-Set in stochastic multi-armed bandits. In a Best-Set instance, we are given $n$ arms with unknown reward distributions, as well as a family $\mathcal{F}$ of feasible subsets over the…
A fundamental challenge for any intelligent system is prediction: given some inputs, can you predict corresponding outcomes? Most work on supervised learning has focused on producing accurate marginal predictions for each input. However, we…
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…
Influence maximization, adaptive routing, and dynamic spectrum allocation all require choosing the right action from a large set of alternatives. Thanks to the advances in combinatorial optimization, these and many similar problems can be…
Motivated by the task of hyperparameter optimization, we introduce the non-stochastic best-arm identification problem. Within the multi-armed bandit literature, the cumulative regret objective enjoys algorithms and analyses for both the…
We study a stochastic bandit algorithm motivated by retry-aware objectives that value the best outcome among multiple attempts, such as pass@$k$ and max@$k$. Given a posterior over arm values, ReMax chooses a sampling distribution that…
We consider the non-stationary multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework and propose a Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test based Thompson Sampling (TS) algorithm named TS-KS, that actively detects change points and resets the TS parameters once a change…
We consider online sequential decision problems where an agent must balance exploration and exploitation. We derive a set of Bayesian `optimistic' policies which, in the stochastic multi-armed bandit case, includes the Thompson sampling…
Classical evolutionary approaches for multiobjective optimization are quite accurate but incur a lot of queries to the objectives; this can be prohibitive when objectives are expensive oracles. A sample-efficient approach to solving…
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…