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

We derive an alternative proof for the regret of Thompson sampling (\ts) in the stochastic linear bandit setting. While we obtain a regret bound of order $\widetilde{O}(d^{3/2}\sqrt{T})$ as in previous results, the proof sheds new light on…

The stochastic multi-arm bandit problem has been extensively studied under standard assumptions on the arm's distribution (e.g bounded with known support, exponential family, etc). These assumptions are suitable for many real-world problems…

Adaptive sampling schemes are well known to create complex dependence that may invalidate conventional inference methods. A recent line of work shows that this need not be the case for UCB-type algorithms in multi-armed bandits. A central…

When two players are engaged in a repeated game with unknown payoff matrices, they may use single-agent multi-armed bandit algorithms to choose the actions independent of each other. We show that when the players use Thompson sampling, the…

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…

In this work, we study the performance of the Thompson Sampling algorithm for Contextual Bandit problems based on the framework introduced by Neu et al. and their concept of lifted information ratio. First, we prove a comprehensive bound on…

Non-stationary multi-armed bandits (NS-MABs) model sequential decision-making problems in which the expected rewards of a set of actions, a.k.a.~arms, evolve over time. In this paper, we fill a gap in the literature by providing a novel…

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…

Most bandit algorithms assume that the reward variances or their upper bounds are known, and that they are the same for all arms. This naturally leads to suboptimal performance and higher regret due to variance overestimation. On the other…

Generative flow networks (GFlowNets) are amortized variational inference algorithms that treat sampling from a distribution over compositional objects as a sequential decision-making problem with a learnable action policy. Unlike other…

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…

Mode estimation is a classical problem in statistics with a wide range of applications in machine learning. Despite this, there is little understanding in its robustness properties under possibly adversarial data contamination. In this…

Mobile health (mHealth) programs face a critical challenge in optimizing the timing of automated health information calls to beneficiaries. This challenge has been formulated as a collaborative multi-armed bandit problem, requiring online…

We study a decentralized cooperative multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem with $K$ arms and $N$ agents connected over a network. In our model, each arm's reward distribution is same for all agents, and rewards are drawn independently…

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…

Thompson sampling (TS) is a popular heuristic for action selection, but it requires sampling from a posterior distribution. Unfortunately, this can become computationally intractable in complex environments, such as those modeled using…

Many real-world functions are defined over both categorical and category-specific continuous variables and thus cannot be optimized by traditional Bayesian optimization (BO) methods. To optimize such functions, we propose a new method that…

We investigate and provide new insights on the sampling rule called Top-Two Thompson Sampling (TTTS). In particular, we justify its use for fixed-confidence best-arm identification. We further propose a variant of TTTS called Top-Two…

This paper studies the Bayesian regret of a variant of the Thompson-Sampling algorithm for bandit problems. It builds upon the information-theoretic framework of [Russo and Van Roy, 2015] and, more specifically, on the rate-distortion…

Decision-making problems of sequential nature, where decisions made in the past may have an impact on the future, are used to model many practically important applications. In some real-world applications, feedback about a decision is…