Related papers: Fixed-Confidence Guarantees for Bayesian Best-Arm …
Influence maximization, adaptive routing, and dynamic spectrum allocation all require choosing the right action from a large set of alternatives. Thanks to the advances in combinatorial optimization, these and many similar problems can be…
In fixed budget bandit identification, an algorithm sequentially observes samples from several distributions up to a given final time. It then answers a query about the set of distributions. A good algorithm will have a small probability of…
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…
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…
We consider the problem of \textit{best arm identification} with a \textit{fixed budget $T$}, in the $K$-armed stochastic bandit setting, with arms distribution defined on $[0,1]$. We prove that any bandit strategy, for at least one bandit…
We study stage-wise conservative linear stochastic bandits: an instance of bandit optimization, which accounts for (unknown) safety constraints that appear in applications such as online advertising and medical trials. At each stage, the…
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…
Thompson sampling is a popular algorithm for solving multi-armed bandit problems, and has been applied in a wide range of applications, from website design to portfolio optimization. In such applications, however, the number of choices (or…
Thompson Sampling is one of the oldest heuristics for multi-armed bandit problems. It is a randomized algorithm based on Bayesian ideas, and has recently generated significant interest after several studies demonstrated it to have better…
Multi-armed Bandit (MAB) algorithms identify the best arm among multiple arms via exploration-exploitation trade-off without prior knowledge of arm statistics. Their usefulness in wireless radio, IoT, and robotics demand deployment on edge…
The problem of identifying the best arm among a collection of items having Gaussian rewards distribution is well understood when the variances are known. Despite its practical relevance for many applications, few works studied it for…
We study, to the best of our knowledge, the first Bayesian algorithm for unimodal Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problems with graph structure. In this setting, each arm corresponds to a node of a graph and each edge provides a relationship,…
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…
We study safe linear bandits (SLBs), where an agent selects actions from a convex set to maximize an unknown linear objective subject to unknown linear constraints in each round. Existing methods for SLBs provide strong regret guarantees,…
In this paper, we propose a Double Thompson Sampling (D-TS) algorithm for dueling bandit problems. As indicated by its name, D-TS selects both the first and the second candidates according to Thompson Sampling. Specifically, D-TS maintains…
We study the real-valued combinatorial pure exploration of the multi-armed bandit (R-CPE-MAB) problem. In R-CPE-MAB, a player is given $d$ stochastic arms, and the reward of each arm $s\in\{1, \ldots, d\}$ follows an unknown distribution…
We consider the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem, where an agent sequentially chooses actions and observes rewards for the actions it took. While the majority of algorithms try to minimize the regret, i.e., the cumulative difference between…
In this paper we propose a general methodology to derive regret bounds for randomized multi-armed bandit algorithms. It consists in checking a set of sufficient conditions on the sampling probability of each arm and on the family of…
The question of the optimality of Thompson Sampling for solving the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem had been open since 1933. In this paper we answer it positively for the case of Bernoulli rewards by providing the first finite-time…
Fixed-budget best-arm identification (BAI) is a bandit problem where the agent maximizes the probability of identifying the optimal arm within a fixed budget of observations. In this work, we study this problem in the Bayesian setting. We…