Related papers: On Thompson Sampling with Langevin Algorithms
It has become increasingly easy nowadays to collect approximate posterior samples via fast algorithms such as variational Bayes, but concerns exist about the estimation accuracy. It is tempting to build solutions that exploit approximate…
Simulating sampling algorithms with people has proven a useful method for efficiently probing and understanding their mental representations. We propose that the same methods can be used to study the representations of Large Language Models…
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…
We propose ${\tt AdaTS}$, a Thompson sampling algorithm that adapts sequentially to bandit tasks that it interacts with. The key idea in ${\tt AdaTS}$ is to adapt to an unknown task prior distribution by maintaining a distribution over its…
Sampling from high-dimensional distributions has wide applications in data science and machine learning but poses significant computational challenges. We introduce Subspace Langevin Monte Carlo (SLMC), a novel and efficient sampling method…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods such as Gibbs sampling are finding widespread use in applied statistics and machine learning. These often lead to difficult computational problems, which are increasingly being solved on parallel and…
Inference after model selection presents computational challenges when dealing with intractable conditional distributions. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a common method for sampling from these distributions, but its slow convergence…
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…
We discuss a Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) procedure for the random sampling of some one-dimensional lattice paths with constraints, for various constraints. We show that an approach inspired by optimal transport allows us to bound…
High-dimensional data are routinely collected in many areas. We are particularly interested in Bayesian classification models in which one or more variables are imbalanced. Current Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for posterior…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have a drawback when working with a target distribution or likelihood function that is computationally expensive to evaluate, specially when working with big data. This paper focuses on…
A challenging aspect of the bandit problem is that a stochastic reward is observed only for the chosen arm and the rewards of other arms remain missing. The dependence of the arm choice on the past context and reward pairs compounds the…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling is an important and commonly used tool for the analysis of hierarchical models. Nevertheless, practitioners generally have two options for MCMC: utilize existing software that generates a black-box…
Probabilistic models are conceptually powerful tools for finding structure in data, but their practical effectiveness is often limited by our ability to perform inference in them. Exact inference is frequently intractable, so approximate…
Restless bandit problems assume time-varying reward distributions of the arms, which adds flexibility to the model but makes the analysis more challenging. We study learning algorithms over the unknown reward distributions and prove a…
We establish strong laws of large numbers and central limit theorems for the regret of two of the most popular bandit algorithms: Thompson sampling and UCB. Here, our characterizations of the regret distribution complement the…
Meta-learning is characterized by its ability to learn how to learn, enabling the adaptation of learning strategies across different tasks. Recent research introduced the Meta-Thompson Sampling (Meta-TS), which meta-learns an unknown prior…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are commonly used for their versatility in sampling from complicated probability distributions. However, as the dimension of the distribution gets larger, the computational costs for a satisfactory…
Bayesian max-margin models have shown superiority in various practical applications, such as text categorization, collaborative prediction, social network link prediction and crowdsourcing, and they conjoin the flexibility of Bayesian…
We study the multi-armed bandit problem with arms which are Markov chains with rewards. In the finite-horizon setting, the celebrated Gittins indices do not apply, and the exact solution is intractable. We provide approximation algorithms…