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Related papers: Thompson Sampling in Non-Episodic Restless Bandits

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Thompson Sampling has been widely used for contextual bandit problems due to the flexibility of its modeling power. However, a general theory for this class of methods in the frequentist setting is still lacking. In this paper, we present a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-05 Tong Zhang

In online learning problems, exploiting low variance plays an important role in obtaining tight performance guarantees yet is challenging because variances are often not known a priori. Recently, considerable progress has been made by Zhang…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-07 Yeoneung Kim , Insoon Yang , Kwang-Sung Jun

In this paper, we revisit the regret minimization problem in sparse stochastic contextual linear bandits, where feature vectors may be of large dimension $d$, but where the reward function depends on a few, say $s_0\ll d$, of these features…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-22 Kaito Ariu , Kenshi Abe , Alexandre Proutière

We study online reinforcement learning in linear Markov decision processes with adversarial losses and bandit feedback, without prior knowledge on transitions or access to simulators. We introduce two algorithms that achieve improved regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Haolin Liu , Chen-Yu Wei , Julian Zimmert

We consider a sequential subset selection problem under parameter uncertainty, where at each time step, the decision maker selects a subset of cardinality $K$ from $N$ possible items (arms), and observes a (bandit) feedback in the form of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-07 Shipra Agrawal , Vashist Avadhanula , Vineet Goyal , Assaf Zeevi

We study the challenging exploration incentive problem in both bandit and reinforcement learning, where the rewards are scale-free and potentially unbounded, driven by real-world scenarios and differing from existing work. Past works in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Mengfan Xu , Diego Klabjan

In a low-rank linear bandit problem, the reward of an action (represented by a matrix of size $d_1 \times d_2$) is the inner product between the action and an unknown low-rank matrix $\Theta^*$. We propose an algorithm based on a novel…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-20 Yangyi Lu , Amirhossein Meisami , Ambuj Tewari

We study high-dimensional multi-armed contextual bandits with batched feedback where the $T$ steps of online interactions are divided into $L$ batches. In specific, each batch collects data according to a policy that depends on previous…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-27 Jianqing Fan , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Chenlu Ye

We consider the stochastic linear contextual bandit problem with high-dimensional features. We analyze the Thompson sampling algorithm using special classes of sparsity-inducing priors (e.g., spike-and-slab) to model the unknown parameter…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-31 Sunrit Chakraborty , Saptarshi Roy , Ambuj Tewari

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

Motivated by clinical trials, we study bandits with observable non-compliance. At each step, the learner chooses an arm, after, instead of observing only the reward, it also observes the action that took place. We show that such…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-02-10 Nicolás Della Penna , Mark D. Reid , David Balduzzi

We present a new algorithm based on posterior sampling for learning in constrained Markov decision processes (CMDP) in the infinite-horizon undiscounted setting. The algorithm achieves near-optimal regret bounds while being advantageous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Danil Provodin , Pratik Gajane , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Maurits Kaptein

We consider a multi-armed bandit problem where payoffs are a linear function of an observed stochastic contextual variable. In the scenario where there exists a gap between optimal and suboptimal rewards, several algorithms have been…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2014-07-08 José Bento , Stratis Ioannidis , S. Muthukrishnan , Jinyun Yan

Thompson Sampling (TS) has attracted a lot of interest due to its good empirical performance, in particular in the computational advertising. Though successful, the tools for its performance analysis appeared only recently. In this paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Tomas Kocak , Michal Valko , Remi Munos , Shipra Agrawal

Stochastic linear bandits are a natural and simple generalisation of finite-armed bandits with numerous practical applications. Current approaches focus on generalising existing techniques for finite-armed bandits, notably the optimism…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-10-17 Tor Lattimore , Csaba Szepesvari

We consider a linear stochastic bandit problem where the dimension $K$ of the unknown parameter $\theta$ is larger than the sampling budget $n$. In such cases, it is in general impossible to derive sub-linear regret bounds since usual…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-05-23 Alexandra Carpentier , Rémi Munos

This paper studies batched bandit learning problems for nondegenerate functions. We introduce an algorithm that solves the batched bandit problem for nondegenerate functions near-optimally. More specifically, we introduce an algorithm,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-09 Yu Liu , Yunlu Shu , Tianyu Wang

We study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem and design new policies that enjoy both worst-case optimality for expected regret and light-tailed risk for regret distribution. Specifically, our policy design (i) enjoys the worst-case…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-23 David Simchi-Levi , Zeyu Zheng , Feng Zhu

Stochastic linear bandits are a fundamental model for sequential decision making, where an agent selects a vector-valued action and receives a noisy reward with expected value given by an unknown linear function. Although well studied in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Bruce Huang , Ruida Zhou , Lin F. Yang , Suhas Diggavi

We consider the setup of stochastic multi-armed bandits in the case when reward distributions are piecewise i.i.d. and bounded with unknown changepoints. We focus on the case when changes happen simultaneously on all arms, and in stark…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard