Related papers: On Thompson Sampling for Smoother-than-Lipschitz B…

Thompson sampling (TS) is widely used for stochastic multi-armed bandits, yet its inferential properties under adaptive data collection are subtle. Classical asymptotic theory for sample means can fail because arm-specific sample sizes are…

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…

This paper introduces the framework of multi-armed sampling, which serves as the sampling counterpart to the optimization problem of multi-armed bandits. Our primary motivation is to rigorously examine the exploration-exploitation trade-off…

Contextual bandits are widely-used in the study of learning-based control policies for finite action spaces. While the problem is well-studied for bandits with perfectly observed context vectors, little is known about the case of…

The PhD thesis of Maillard (2013) presents a rather obscure algorithm for the $K$-armed bandit problem. This less-known algorithm, which we call Maillard sampling (MS), computes the probability of choosing each arm in a \textit{closed…

We study the problem of online multi-task learning where the tasks are performed within similar but not necessarily identical multi-armed bandit environments. In particular, we study how a learner can improve its overall performance across…

We consider the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with a prior distribution on the reward distributions. We are interested in studying prior-free and prior-dependent regret bounds, very much in the same spirit as the usual…

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…

Variance-dependent regret bounds have received increasing attention in recent studies on contextual bandits. However, most of these studies are focused on upper confidence bound (UCB)-based bandit algorithms, while sampling based bandit…

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…

We study bandit convex optimization methods that adapt to the norm of the comparator, a topic that has only been studied before for its full-information counterpart. Specifically, we develop convex bandit algorithms with regret bounds that…

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,…

Stochastic rising rested bandit (SRRB) is a setting where the arms' expected rewards increase as they are pulled. It models scenarios in which the performances of the different options grow as an effect of an underlying learning process…

In this paper, we study the application of the Thompson sampling (TS) methodology to the stochastic combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) framework. We first analyze the standard TS algorithm for the general CMAB model when the outcome…

The stochastic multi-armed bandit problem is well understood when the reward distributions are sub-Gaussian. In this paper we examine the bandit problem under the weaker assumption that the distributions have moments of order 1+\epsilon,…

We define a novel family of algorithms for the adversarial multi-armed bandit problem, and provide a simple analysis technique based on convex smoothing. We prove two main results. First, we show that regularization via the \emph{Tsallis…

In many online learning or multi-armed bandit problems, the taken actions or pulled arms are ordinal and required to be monotone over time. Examples include dynamic pricing, in which the firms use markup pricing policies to please early…

Thompson Sampling has been demonstrated in many complex bandit models, however the theoretical guarantees available for the parametric multi-armed bandit are still limited to the Bernoulli case. Here we extend them by proving asymptotic…

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…

We consider the problem of global optimization of a function over a continuous domain. In our setup, we can evaluate the function sequentially at points of our choice and the evaluations are noisy. We frame it as a continuum-armed bandit…