Related papers: TS-UCB: Improving on Thompson Sampling With Little…
We introduce Stacked Thompson Bandits (STB) for efficiently generating plans that are likely to satisfy a given bounded temporal logic requirement. STB uses a simulation for evaluation of plans, and takes a Bayesian approach to using the…
Contextual bandits constitute a classical framework for decision-making under uncertainty. In this setting, the goal is to learn the arms of highest reward subject to contextual information, while the unknown reward parameters of each arm…
Stochastic Rank-One Bandits (Katarya et al, (2017a,b)) are a simple framework for regret minimization problems over rank-one matrices of arms. The initially proposed algorithms are proved to have logarithmic regret, but do not match the…
Combinatorial bandits extend the classical bandit framework to settings where the learner selects multiple arms in each round, motivated by applications such as online recommendation and assortment optimization. While extensions of upper…
We consider a Bayesian budgeted multi-armed bandit problem, in which each arm consumes a different amount of resources when selected and there is a budget constraint on the total amount of resources that can be used. Budgeted Thompson…
Ensemble sampling serves as a practical approximation to Thompson sampling when maintaining an exact posterior distribution over model parameters is computationally intractable. In this paper, we establish a regret bound that ensures…
I present the first algorithm for stochastic finite-armed bandits that simultaneously enjoys order-optimal problem-dependent regret and worst-case regret. Besides the theoretical results, the new algorithm is simple, efficient and…
Efficient exploration in bandits is a fundamental online learning problem. We propose a variant of Thompson sampling that learns to explore better as it interacts with bandit instances drawn from an unknown prior. The algorithm meta-learns…
Thompson sampling (TS) has emerged as a robust technique for contextual bandit problems. However, TS requires posterior inference and optimization for action generation, prohibiting its use in many online platforms where latency and ease of…
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,…
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…
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…
Thompson Sampling, one of the oldest heuristics for solving multi-armed bandits, has recently been shown to demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. The empirical success has led to great interests in theoretical understanding of this…
How can we make use of information parallelism in online decision making problems while efficiently balancing the exploration-exploitation trade-off? In this paper, we introduce a batch Thompson Sampling framework for two canonical online…
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…
We consider the combinatorial bandits problem, where at each time step, the online learner selects a size-$k$ subset $s$ from the arms set $\mathcal{A}$, where $\left|\mathcal{A}\right| = n$, and observes a stochastic reward of each arm in…
Stochastic multi-armed bandits (MABs) provide a fundamental reinforcement learning model to study sequential decision making in uncertain environments. The upper confidence bounds (UCB) algorithm gave birth to the renaissance of bandit…
In linear contextual bandits, the objective is to select actions that maximize cumulative rewards, modeled as a linear function with unknown parameters. Although Thompson Sampling performs well empirically, it does not achieve optimal…
In this paper, we investigate the impact of diverse user preference on learning under the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework. We aim to show that when the user preferences are sufficiently diverse and each arm can be optimal for…
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…