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We consider a non-stationary two-armed bandit framework and propose a change-detection based Thompson sampling (TS) algorithm, named TS with change-detection (TS-CD), to keep track of the dynamic environment. The non-stationarity is modeled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-09 Gourab Ghatak

The best arm identification problem requires identifying the best alternative (i.e., arm) in active experimentation using the smallest number of experiments (i.e., arm pulls), which is crucial for cost-efficient and timely decision-making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Kapilan Balagopalan , Tuan Ngo Nguyen , Yao Zhao , Kwang-Sung Jun

Thompson Sampling (TS) is widely used to address the exploration/exploitation tradeoff in contextual bandits, yet recent theory shows that it does not explore aggressively enough in high-dimensional problems. Feel-Good Thompson Sampling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Emile Anand , Sarah Liaw

Thompson Sampling algorithm is a well known Bayesian algorithm for solving stochastic multi-armed bandit. At each time step the algorithm chooses each arm with probability proportional to it being the current best arm. We modify the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-10-09 Qiang Ha

We consider the fixed-confidence best arm identification (FC-BAI) problem in the Bayesian setting. This problem aims to find the arm of the largest mean with a fixed confidence level when the bandit model has been sampled from the known…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-25 Kyoungseok Jang , Junpei Komiyama , Kazutoshi Yamazaki

We study the regret of Thompson sampling (TS) algorithms for exponential family bandits, where the reward distribution is from a one-dimensional exponential family, which covers many common reward distributions including Bernoulli,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-09 Tianyuan Jin , Pan Xu , Xiaokui Xiao , Anima Anandkumar

We consider the question introduced by \cite{Mason2020} of identifying all the $\varepsilon$-optimal arms in a finite stochastic multi-armed bandit with Gaussian rewards. We give two lower bounds on the sample complexity of any algorithm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-07 Aymen Al Marjani , Tomáš Kocák , Aurélien Garivier

This note introduce three Bayesian style Multi-armed bandit algorithms: Information-directed sampling, Thompson Sampling and Generalized Thompson Sampling. The goal is to give an intuitive explanation for these three algorithms and their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-25 Li Zhou

Much of the recent literature on bandit learning focuses on algorithms that aim to converge on an optimal action. One shortcoming is that this orientation does not account for time sensitivity, which can play a crucial role when learning an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-09 Daniel Russo , Benjamin Van Roy

We propose $\tt RandUCB$, a bandit strategy that builds on theoretically derived confidence intervals similar to upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms, but akin to Thompson sampling (TS), it uses randomization to trade off exploration and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-24 Sharan Vaswani , Abbas Mehrabian , Audrey Durand , Branislav Kveton

Thompson sampling provides a solution to bandit problems in which new observations are allocated to arms with the posterior probability that an arm is optimal. While sometimes easy to implement and asymptotically optimal, Thompson sampling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-10-16 Dean Eckles , Maurits Kaptein

In this paper we study a multi-arm bandit problem in which the quality of each arm is measured by the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) at some level alpha of the reward distribution. While existing works in this setting mainly focus on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Dorian Baudry , Romain Gautron , Emilie Kaufmann , Odalric-Ambryn Maillard

Bayesian bandit algorithms with approximate Bayesian inference have been widely used in real-world applications. Despite the superior practical performance, their theoretical justification is less investigated in the literature, especially…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-23 Ziyi Huang , Henry Lam , Haofeng Zhang

We analyze the regret of combinatorial Thompson sampling (CTS) for the combinatorial multi-armed bandit with probabilistically triggered arms under the semi-bandit feedback setting. We assume that the learner has access to an exact…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-20 Alihan Hüyük , Cem Tekin

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

We study a widely used Bayesian optimization method, Gaussian process Thompson sampling (GP-TS), under the assumption that the objective function is a sample path from a GP. Compared with the GP upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-11 Shion Takeno , Shogo Iwazaki

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-10 Xuheng Li , Heyang Zhao , Quanquan Gu

We here adopt Bayesian nonparametric mixture models to extend multi-armed bandits in general, and Thompson sampling in particular, to scenarios where there is reward model uncertainty. In the stochastic multi-armed bandit, the reward for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-08-26 Iñigo Urteaga , Chris H. Wiggins

We study Thompson Sampling-based algorithms for stochastic bandits with bounded rewards. As the existing problem-dependent regret bound for Thompson Sampling with Gaussian priors [Agrawal and Goyal, 2017] is vacuous when $T \le 288 e^{64}$,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Bingshan Hu , Zhiming Huang , Tianyue H. Zhang , Mathias Lécuyer , Nidhi Hegde

Thompson sampling (TS) is one of the most popular and earliest algorithms to solve stochastic multi-armed bandit problems. We consider a variant of TS, named $\alpha$-TS, where we use a fractional or $\alpha$-posterior ($\alpha\in(0,1)$)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-09-13 Prateek Jaiswal , Debdeep Pati , Anirban Bhattacharya , Bani K. Mallick