English
Related papers

Related papers: Thompson Sampling for Noncompliant Bandits

200 papers

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-29 Joseph Jay Williams , Jacob Nogas , Nina Deliu , Hammad Shaikh , Sofia S. Villar , Audrey Durand , Anna Rafferty

We introduce a framework for Thompson sampling (TS) contextual bandit algorithms, in which the algorithm's ability to quantify uncertainty and make decisions depends on the quality of a generative model that is learned offline. Instead of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Kelly W. Zhang , Tiffany Tianhui Cai , Hongseok Namkoong , Daniel Russo

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-17 Yichi Zhou , Jun Zhu , Jingwei Zhuo

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…

Thompson sampling has become a ubiquitous approach to online decision problems with bandit feedback. The key algorithmic task for Thompson sampling is drawing a sample from the posterior of the optimal action. We propose an alternative arm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-05 Jackie Baek , Vivek F. Farias

In this paper we consider an online recommendation setting, where a platform recommends a sequence of items to its users at every time period. The users respond by selecting one of the items recommended or abandon the platform due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-16 Yunjuan Wang , Theja Tulabandhula

Meta-learning is characterized by its ability to learn how to learn, enabling the adaptation of learning strategies across different tasks. Recent research introduced the Meta-Thompson Sampling (Meta-TS), which meta-learns an unknown prior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-09-12 Hao Li , Dong Liang , Zheng Xie

We investigate experiments that are designed to select a treatment arm for population deployment. Multi-armed bandit algorithms can enhance efficiency by dynamically allocating measurement effort towards higher performing arms based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-29 Chao Qin , Daniel Russo

The dueling bandits problem is an online learning framework for learning from pairwise preference feedback, and is particularly well-suited for modeling settings that elicit subjective or implicit human feedback. In this paper, we study the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-02 Yanan Sui , Vincent Zhuang , Joel W. Burdick , Yisong Yue

Designing efficient exploration is central to Reinforcement Learning due to the fundamental problem posed by the exploration-exploitation dilemma. Bayesian exploration strategies like Thompson Sampling resolve this trade-off in a principled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Rong Zhu , Mattia Rigotti

We study the logistic bandit, in which rewards are binary with success probability $\exp(\beta a^\top \theta) / (1 + \exp(\beta a^\top \theta))$ and actions $a$ and coefficients $\theta$ are within the $d$-dimensional unit ball. While prior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-14 Shi Dong , Tengyu Ma , Benjamin Van Roy

Consider a bandit algorithm that recommends actions to self-interested users in a recommendation system. The users are free to choose other actions and need to be incentivized to follow the algorithm's recommendations. While the users…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Xinyan Hu , Dung Daniel Ngo , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Zhiwei Steven Wu

Motivated by runtime verification of QoS requirements in self-adaptive and self-organizing systems that are able to reconfigure their structure and behavior in response to runtime data, we propose a QoS-aware variant of Thompson sampling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-03 Lenz Belzner , Thomas Gabor

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-10-04 Sébastien Bubeck , Che-Yu Liu

In Bayesian Optimization (BO), additive assumptions can mitigate the twin difficulties of modeling and searching a complex function in high dimension. However, common acquisition functions, like the Additive Lower Confidence Bound, ignore…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-15 Nathan Wycoff

Pursuit-evasion is a multi-agent sequential decision problem wherein a group of agents known as pursuers coordinate their traversal of a spatial domain to locate an agent trying to evade them. Pursuit evasion problems arise in a number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-13 Zhen Li , Nicholas J. Meyer , Eric B. Laber , Robert Brigantic

Contextual bandits are a core technology for personalized mobile health interventions, where decision-making requires adapting to complex, non-linear user behaviors. While Thompson Sampling (TS) is a preferred strategy for these problems,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-10 Ruizhe Deng , Bibhas Chakraborty , Ran Chen , Yan Shuo Tan

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Joey Hong , Branislav Kveton , Manzil Zaheer , Yinlam Chow , Amr Ahmed , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Craig Boutilier

Non-stationarity is ubiquitous in human behavior and addressing it in the contextual bandits is challenging. Several works have addressed the problem by investigating semi-parametric contextual bandits and warned that ignoring…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-05-18 Young-Geun Choi , Gi-Soo Kim , Seunghoon Paik , Myunghee Cho Paik

Real-world contextual bandit problems with complex reward models are often tackled with iteratively trained models, such as boosting trees. However, it is difficult to directly apply simple and effective exploration strategies--such as…