Related papers: Parallelizing Thompson Sampling
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 consider the problem of stochastic $K$-armed dueling bandit in the contextual setting, where at each round the learner is presented with a context set of $K$ items, each represented by a $d$-dimensional feature vector, and the goal of…
We consider a remote contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) problem, in which the decision-maker observes the context and the reward, but must communicate the actions to be taken by the agents over a rate-limited communication channel. This…
Motivated by the pressing need for efficient optimization in online recommender systems, we revisit the cascading bandit model proposed by Kveton et al. (2015). While Thompson sampling (TS) algorithms have been shown to be empirically…
We prove that two popular linear contextual bandit algorithms, OFUL and Thompson Sampling, can be made efficient using Frequent Directions, a deterministic online sketching technique. More precisely, we show that a sketch of size $m$ allows…
Psychological research shows that enjoyment of many goods is subject to satiation, with short-term satisfaction declining after repeated exposures to the same item. Nevertheless, proposed algorithms for powering recommender systems seldom…
We study the $K$-armed dueling bandit problem, a variation of the traditional multi-armed bandit problem in which feedback is obtained in the form of pairwise comparisons. Previous learning algorithms have focused on the $\textit{fully…
Consider a bandit algorithm that recommends actions to self-interested users in a recommendation system. The users are free to choose other actions and need to be incentivized to follow the algorithm's recommendations. While the users…
Stochastic rising rested bandit (SRRB) is a setting where the arms' expected rewards increase as they are pulled. It models scenarios in which the performances of the different options grow as an effect of an underlying learning process…
Thompson Sampling algorithm is a well known Bayesian algorithm for solving stochastic multi-armed bandit. At each time step the algorithm chooses each arm with probability proportional to it being the current best arm. We modify the…
Speculative decoding accelerates LLMs by using a lightweight draft model to generate tokens autoregressively before verifying them in parallel with a larger target model. However, determining the optimal number of tokens to draft remains a…
Multi-armed bandits (MAB) are extensively studied in various settings where the objective is to \textit{maximize} the actions' outcomes (i.e., rewards) over time. Since safety is crucial in many real-world problems, safe versions of MAB…
Real-world contextual bandit problems with complex reward models are often tackled with iteratively trained models, such as boosting trees. However, it is difficult to directly apply simple and effective exploration strategies--such as…
This thesis aims to study some of the mathematical challenges that arise in the analysis of statistical sequential decision-making algorithms for postoperative patients follow-up. Stochastic bandits (multiarmed, contextual) model the…
We consider the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem, where an agent sequentially chooses actions and observes rewards for the actions it took. While the majority of algorithms try to minimize the regret, i.e., the cumulative difference between…
We provide an approach for the analysis of randomised exploration algorithms like Thompson sampling that does not rely on forced optimism or posterior inflation. With this, we demonstrate that in the $d$-dimensional linear bandit setting,…
We study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with the graph-based feedback structure introduced by Mannor and Shamir. We analyze the performance of the two most prominent stochastic bandit algorithms, Thompson Sampling and Upper…
We study the process-level dynamics of Thompson sampling and related sampling-based bandit algorithms in the ``small gap'' regime, where the gaps between the arm means are of order $\sqrt{\gamma}$ or smaller and the time horizon is of order…
Influence maximization, adaptive routing, and dynamic spectrum allocation all require choosing the right action from a large set of alternatives. Thanks to the advances in combinatorial optimization, these and many similar problems can be…
Static recommendation methods like collaborative filtering suffer from the inherent limitation of performing real-time personalization for cold-start users. Online recommendation, e.g., multi-armed bandit approach, addresses this limitation…