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Contextual multi-armed bandits are classical models in reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making associated with individual information. A widely-used policy for bandits is Thompson Sampling, where samples from a data-driven…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-30 Hongju Park , Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh

Thompson sampling is one of the most widely used algorithms for many online decision problems, due to its simplicity in implementation and superior empirical performance over other state-of-the-art methods. Despite its popularity and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-02 Tianyuan Jin , Pan Xu , Jieming Shi , Xiaokui Xiao , Quanquan Gu

This paper studies the stochastic linear bandit problem, where a decision-maker chooses actions from possibly time-dependent sets of vectors in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and receives noisy rewards. The objective is to minimize regret, the difference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-24 Nima Hamidi , Mohsen Bayati

The design and performance analysis of bandit algorithms in the presence of stage-wise safety or reliability constraints has recently garnered significant interest. In this work, we consider the linear stochastic bandit problem under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Ahmadreza Moradipari , Sanae Amani , Mahnoosh Alizadeh , Christos Thrampoulidis

We discuss a multiple-play multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem in which several arms are selected at each round. Recently, Thompson sampling (TS), a randomized algorithm with a Bayesian spirit, has attracted much attention for its empirically…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-22 Junpei Komiyama , Junya Honda , Hiroshi Nakagawa

We investigate properties of Thompson Sampling in the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with delayed feedback. In a setting with i.i.d delays, we establish to our knowledge the first regret bounds for Thompson Sampling with arbitrary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Han Wu , Stefan Wager

We study multi-armed bandit problems with graph feedback, in which the decision maker is allowed to observe the neighboring actions of the chosen action, in a setting where the graph may vary over time and is never fully revealed to the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-24 Fang Liu , Zizhan Zheng , Ness Shroff

We study a stochastic bandit algorithm motivated by retry-aware objectives that value the best outcome among multiple attempts, such as pass@$k$ and max@$k$. Given a posterior over arm values, ReMax chooses a sampling distribution that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Bingkui Tong , Junpei Komiyama , Soichiro Nishimori , Paavo Parmas

Thompson Sampling is a principled method for balancing exploration and exploitation, but its real-world adoption faces computational challenges in large-scale or non-conjugate settings. While ensemble-based approaches offer partial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Yingru Li , Jiawei Xu , Baoxiang Wang , Zhi-Quan Luo

In this paper we propose a general methodology to derive regret bounds for randomized multi-armed bandit algorithms. It consists in checking a set of sufficient conditions on the sampling probability of each arm and on the family of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-14 Dorian Baudry , Kazuya Suzuki , Junya Honda

In this paper, we study the problem of stochastic linear bandits with finite action sets. Most of existing work assume the payoffs are bounded or sub-Gaussian, which may be violated in some scenarios such as financial markets. To settle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-29 Bo Xue , Guanghui Wang , Yimu Wang , Lijun Zhang

We use the lens of weak signal asymptotics to study a class of sequentially randomized experiments, including those that arise in solving multi-armed bandit problems. In an experiment with $n$ time steps, we let the mean reward gaps between…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-06-26 Xu Kuang , Stefan Wager

Thompson sampling (TS) is widely used in sequential decision making due to its ease of use and appealing empirical performance. However, many existing analytical and empirical results for TS rely on restrictive assumptions on reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Amin Karbasi , Nikki Lijing Kuang , Yi-An Ma , Siddharth Mitra

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

In this paper, we introduce and analyze a variant of the Thompson sampling (TS) algorithm for contextual bandits. At each round, traditional TS requires samples from the current posterior distribution, which is usually intractable. To…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-23 Pierre Clavier , Tom Huix , Alain Durmus

We investigate finite stochastic partial monitoring, which is a general model for sequential learning with limited feedback. While Thompson sampling is one of the most promising algorithms on a variety of online decision-making problems,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-11 Taira Tsuchiya , Junya Honda , Masashi Sugiyama

We study the Bayesian regret of the renowned Thompson Sampling algorithm in contextual bandits with binary losses and adversarially-selected contexts. We adapt the information-theoretic perspective of \cite{RvR16} to the contextual setting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Gergely Neu , Julia Olkhovskaya , Matteo Papini , Ludovic Schwartz

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-10-04 Sébastien Bubeck , Che-Yu Liu

The multi-armed bandit problem is a popular model for studying exploration/exploitation trade-off in sequential decision problems. Many algorithms are now available for this well-studied problem. One of the earliest algorithms, given by W.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-04-10 Shipra Agrawal , Navin Goyal

This paper studies the Bayesian regret of a variant of the Thompson-Sampling algorithm for bandit problems. It builds upon the information-theoretic framework of [Russo and Van Roy, 2015] and, more specifically, on the rate-distortion…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-07 Amaury Gouverneur , Borja Rodríguez-Gálvez , Tobias J. Oechtering , Mikael Skoglund