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Related papers: Thompson Sampling with Approximate Inference

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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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-19 Hongju Park , Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-24 Christoph Dann , Mehryar Mohri , Tong Zhang , Julian Zimmert

In this paper we consider Thompson Sampling (TS) for combinatorial semi-bandits. We demonstrate that, perhaps surprisingly, TS is sub-optimal for this problem in the sense that its regret scales exponentially in the ambient dimension, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-22 Raymond Zhang , Richard Combes

We provide an approach for the analysis of randomised exploration algorithms like Thompson sampling that does not rely on forced optimism or posterior inflation. With this, we demonstrate that in the $d$-dimensional linear bandit setting,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Marc Abeille , David Janz , Ciara Pike-Burke

In algorithm optimization in reinforcement learning, how to deal with the exploration-exploitation dilemma is particularly important. Multi-armed bandit problem can optimize the proposed solutions by changing the reward distribution to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-28 Zhendong Shi , Ercan E. Kuruoglu , Xiaoli Wei

Thompson sampling (TS) is one of the most popular exploration techniques in reinforcement learning (RL). However, most TS algorithms with theoretical guarantees are difficult to implement and not generalizable to Deep RL. While the emerging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Haque Ishfaq , Yixin Tan , Yu Yang , Qingfeng Lan , Jianfeng Lu , A. Rupam Mahmood , Doina Precup , Pan Xu

We study multi-armed bandit problems with graph feedback, in which the decision maker is allowed to observe the neighboring actions of the chosen action, in a setting where the graph may vary over time and is never fully revealed to the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-24 Fang Liu , Zizhan Zheng , Ness Shroff

We propose algorithms based on a multi-level Thompson sampling scheme, for the stochastic multi-armed bandit and its contextual variant with linear expected rewards, in the setting where arms are clustered. We show, both theoretically and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Emil Carlsson , Devdatt Dubhashi , Fredrik D. Johansson

Given a set of arms $\mathcal{Z}\subset \mathbb{R}^d$ and an unknown parameter vector $\theta_\ast\in\mathbb{R}^d$, the pure exploration linear bandit problem aims to return $\arg\max_{z\in \mathcal{Z}} z^{\top}\theta_{\ast}$, with high…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-26 Zhaoqi Li , Kevin Jamieson , Lalit Jain

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-06 Marc Abeille , Alessandro Lazaric

We develop a form Thompson sampling for online learning under full feedback - also known as prediction with expert advice - where the learner's prior is defined over the space of an adversary's future actions, rather than the space of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Alexander Terenin , Jeffrey Negrea

Motivated by the pressing need for efficient optimization in online recommender systems, we revisit the cascading bandit model proposed by Kveton et al. (2015). While Thompson sampling (TS) algorithms have been shown to be empirically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Zixin Zhong , Wang Chi Cheung , Vincent Y. F. Tan

We study the performance of the Thompson Sampling algorithm for logistic bandit problems. In this setting, an agent receives binary rewards with probabilities determined by a logistic function, $\exp(\beta \langle a, \theta…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-21 Amaury Gouverneur , Borja Rodríguez-Gálvez , Tobias J. Oechtering , Mikael Skoglund

Thompson Sampling is a well established approach to bandit and reinforcement learning problems. However its use in continuum armed bandit problems has received relatively little attention. We provide the first bounds on the regret of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-27 James A. Grant , David S. Leslie

Thompson sampling has proven effective across a wide range of stationary bandit environments. However, as we demonstrate in this paper, it can perform poorly when applied to non-stationary environments. We attribute such failures to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Yueyang Liu , Xu Kuang , Benjamin Van Roy

Thompson sampling, a Bayesian method for balancing exploration and exploitation in bandit problems, has theoretical guarantees and exhibits strong empirical performance in many domains. Traditional Thompson sampling, however, assumes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-04 Andrew Stirn , Tony Jebara

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Amin Karbasi , Vahab Mirrokni , Mohammad Shadravan

Thompson sampling is one of the earliest randomized algorithms for multi-armed bandits (MAB). In this paper, we extend the Thompson sampling to Budgeted MAB, where there is random cost for pulling an arm and the total cost is constrained by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-05-04 Yingce Xia , Haifang Li , Tao Qin , Nenghai Yu , Tie-Yan Liu

Efficient exploration in bandits is a fundamental online learning problem. We propose a variant of Thompson sampling that learns to explore better as it interacts with bandit instances drawn from an unknown prior. The algorithm meta-learns…

The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a classical learning task that exemplifies the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. However, standard formulations do not take into account {\em risk}. In online decision making systems, risk is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Qiuyu Zhu , Vincent Y. F. Tan