Related papers: Thompson Sampling on Symmetric $\alpha$-Stable Ban…

We consider the problem of global optimization of a function over a continuous domain. In our setup, we can evaluate the function sequentially at points of our choice and the evaluations are noisy. We frame it as a continuum-armed bandit…

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…

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…

In this paper, we investigate the performance of Thompson Sampling (TS) for online learning with censored feedback, focusing primarily on the classic repeated newsvendor model--a foundational framework in inventory management--and…

Many real-world bandit applications are characterized by sparse rewards, which can significantly hinder learning efficiency. Leveraging problem-specific structures for careful distribution modeling is recognized as essential for improving…

In this paper we consider the contextual multi-armed bandit problem for linear payoffs under a risk-averse criterion. At each round, contexts are revealed for each arm, and the decision maker chooses one arm to pull and receives the…

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…

The batched multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, in which rewards are collected in batches, is crucial for applications such as clinical trials. Existing research predominantly assumes light-tailed reward distributions, yet many real-world…

Meta-, multi-task, and federated learning can be all viewed as solving similar tasks, drawn from a distribution that reflects task similarities. We provide a unified view of all these problems, as learning to act in a hierarchical Bayesian…

We introduce a novel anytime Batched Thompson sampling policy for multi-armed bandits where the agent observes the rewards of her actions and adjusts her policy only at the end of a small number of batches. We show that this policy…

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…

Contextual dueling bandits, where a learner compares two options based on context and receives feedback indicating which was preferred, extends classic dueling bandits by incorporating contextual information for decision-making and…

This paper proposes regenerative particle Thompson sampling (RPTS), a flexible variation of Thompson sampling. Thompson sampling itself is a Bayesian heuristic for solving stochastic bandit problems, but it is hard to implement in practice…

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…

Preference feedback, in the form of pairwise comparisons rather than scalar scores, has seen increasing use in applications such as human-, laboratory-, and expert-in-the-loop design, as well as scientific discovery. We propose a Thompson…

Mean rewards of actions are often correlated. The form of these correlations may be complex and unknown a priori, such as the preferences of a user for recommended products and their categories. To maximize statistical efficiency, it is…

Thompson sampling (TS) has attracted a lot of interest in the bandit area. It was introduced in the 1930s but has not been theoretically proven until recent years. All of its analysis in the combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) setting…

Multiple-play bandits aim at displaying relevant items at relevant positions on a web page. We introduce a new bandit-based algorithm, PB-MHB, for online recommender systems which uses the Thompson sampling framework. This algorithm handles…

Stable distributions provide a flexible framework for modeling heavy-tailed and skewed data, with the stability index $\alpha$ quantifying tail heaviness. We propose a new semiparametric estimator for $\alpha$ that leverages the two-sum…

Contextual dueling bandit is used to model the bandit problems, where a learner's goal is to find the best arm for a given context using observed noisy human preference feedback over the selected arms for the past contexts. However,…