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In this paper we consider an online recommendation setting, where a platform recommends a sequence of items to its users at every time period. The users respond by selecting one of the items recommended or abandon the platform due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-16 Yunjuan Wang , Theja Tulabandhula

In stochastic bandit problems, a Bayesian policy called Thompson sampling (TS) has recently attracted much attention for its excellent empirical performance. However, the theoretical analysis of this policy is difficult and its asymptotic…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-11-11 Junya Honda , Akimichi Takemura

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Shintaro Nakamura , Masashi Sugiyama

In this paper, we study the problem of estimating uniformly well the mean values of several distributions given a finite budget of samples. If the variance of the distributions were known, one could design an optimal sampling strategy by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-17 Alexandra Carpentier , Alessandro Lazaric , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Rémi Munos , Peter Auer , András Antos

This paper unifies the design and the analysis of risk-averse Thompson sampling algorithms for the multi-armed bandit problem for a class of risk functionals $\rho$ that are continuous and dominant. We prove generalised concentration bounds…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-19 Joel Q. L. Chang , Vincent Y. F. Tan

We study a generalization of the multi-armed bandit problem with multiple plays where there is a cost associated with pulling each arm and the agent has a budget at each time that dictates how much she can expect to spend. We derive an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-13 Alexander Luedtke , Emilie Kaufmann , Antoine Chambaz

Thompson sampling has proven effective across a wide range of stationary bandit environments. However, as we demonstrate in this paper, it can perform poorly when applied to non-stationary environments. We attribute such failures to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Yueyang Liu , Xu Kuang , Benjamin Van Roy

We study finite-armed stochastic bandits where the rewards of each arm might be correlated to those of other arms. We introduce a novel phased algorithm that exploits the given structure to build confidence sets over the parameters of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Andrea Tirinzoni , Alessandro Lazaric , Marcello Restelli

We present a provably optimal differentially private algorithm for the stochastic multi-arm bandit problem, as opposed to the private analogue of the UCB-algorithm [Mishra and Thakurta, 2015; Tossou and Dimitrakakis, 2016] which doesn't…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-24 Touqir Sajed , Or Sheffet

When two players are engaged in a repeated game with unknown payoff matrices, they may use single-agent multi-armed bandit algorithms to choose the actions independent of each other. We show that when the players use Thompson sampling, the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yi Xiong , Ningyuan Chen , Xuefeng Gao

Thompson Sampling (TS) and its variants are powerful Multi-Armed Bandit algorithms used to balance exploration and exploitation strategies in active learning. Yet, their probabilistic nature often turns them into a "black box", hindering…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Parsa Vares , Éloi Durant , Jun Pang , Nicolas Médoc , Mohammad Ghoniem

We study the Stochastic Multi-armed Bandit problem under bounded arm-memory. In this setting, the arms arrive in a stream, and the number of arms that can be stored in the memory at any time, is bounded. The decision-maker can only pull…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-10 Arnab Maiti , Vishakha Patil , Arindam Khan

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-28 Soumya Basu , Branislav Kveton , Manzil Zaheer , Csaba Szepesvári

In many biomedical, science, and engineering problems, one must sequentially decide which action to take next so as to maximize rewards. One general class of algorithms for optimizing interactions with the world, while simultaneously…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-05 Iñigo Urteaga , Chris H. Wiggins

We study a decentralized cooperative multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem with $K$ arms and $N$ agents connected over a network. In our model, each arm's reward distribution is same for all agents, and rewards are drawn independently…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-29 Anusha Lalitha , Andrea Goldsmith

Conducting randomized experiments in education settings raises the question of how we can use machine learning techniques to improve educational interventions. Using Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) algorithms like Thompson Sampling (TS) in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-11 Fernando J. Yanez , Angela Zavaleta-Bernuy , Ziwen Han , Michael Liut , Anna Rafferty , Joseph Jay Williams

Non-stationary multi-armed bandits (NS-MABs) model sequential decision-making problems in which the expected rewards of a set of actions, a.k.a.~arms, evolve over time. In this paper, we fill a gap in the literature by providing a novel…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-17 Marco Fiandri , Alberto Maria Metelli , Francesco Trovò

This technical note presents a new approach to carrying out the kind of exploration achieved by Thompson sampling, but without explicitly maintaining or sampling from posterior distributions. The approach is based on a bootstrap technique…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-07-02 Ian Osband , Benjamin Van Roy

Thompson sampling has been shown to be an effective policy across a variety of online learning tasks. Many works have analyzed the finite time performance of Thompson sampling, and proved that it achieves a sub-linear regret under a broad…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-10 Cem Kalkanli , Ayfer Ozgur

We address online combinatorial optimization when the player has a prior over the adversary's sequence of losses. In this framework, Russo and Van Roy proposed an information-theoretic analysis of Thompson Sampling based on the information…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-05 Sébastien Bubeck , Mark Sellke