Related papers: Statistical Efficiency of Thompson Sampling for Co…
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…
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…
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…
Multi-task learning in contextual bandits has attracted significant research interest due to its potential to enhance decision-making across multiple related tasks by leveraging shared structures and task-specific heterogeneity. In this…
Detecting a minor average treatment effect is a major challenge in large-scale applications, where even minimal improvements can have a significant economic impact. Traditional methods, reliant on normal distribution-based or expanded…
Contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms have been shown promising for maximizing cumulative rewards in sequential decision tasks such as news article recommendation systems, web page ad placement algorithms, and mobile health.…
We provide a simple method to combine stochastic bandit algorithms. Our approach is based on a "meta-UCB" procedure that treats each of $N$ individual bandit algorithms as arms in a higher-level $N$-armed bandit problem that we solve with a…
The problem of multi-armed bandits (MAB) asks to make sequential decisions while balancing between exploitation and exploration, and have been successfully applied to a wide range of practical scenarios. Various algorithms have been…
The stochastic multi-arm bandit problem has been extensively studied under standard assumptions on the arm's distribution (e.g bounded with known support, exponential family, etc). These assumptions are suitable for many real-world problems…
Thompson sampling is a heuristic algorithm for the multi-armed bandit problem which has a long tradition in machine learning. The algorithm has a Bayesian spirit in the sense that it selects arms based on posterior samples of reward…
The combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) is a fundamental sequential decision-making framework, extensively studied over the past decade. However, existing work primarily focuses on the online setting, overlooking the substantial costs…
Recent works on Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) and Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandits (COM-MAB) show good results on a global accuracy metric. This can be achieved, in the case of recommender systems, with personalization. However, with a…
Non-stationarity is ubiquitous in human behavior and addressing it in the contextual bandits is challenging. Several works have addressed the problem by investigating semi-parametric contextual bandits and warned that ignoring…
This paper considers the problem of combinatorial multi-armed bandits with semi-bandit feedback and a cardinality constraint on the super-arm size. Existing algorithms for solving this problem typically involve two key sub-routines: (1) a…
In this paper, we study sequential decision-making for maximizing the Sharpe ratio (SR) in a stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) setting. Unlike standard bandit formulations that maximize cumulative reward, SR optimization requires…
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…
We investigate a Bayesian $k$-armed bandit problem in the \emph{many-armed} regime, where $k \geq \sqrt{T}$ and $T$ represents the time horizon. Initially, and aligned with recent literature on many-armed bandit problems, we observe that…
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,…
We address differentially private stochastic bandit problems from the angles of exploring the deep connections among Thompson Sampling with Gaussian priors, Gaussian mechanisms, and Gaussian differential privacy (GDP). We propose DP-TS-UCB,…
We study the efficiency of Thompson sampling for contextual bandits. Existing Thompson sampling-based algorithms need to construct a Laplace approximation (i.e., a Gaussian distribution) of the posterior distribution, which is inefficient…