Related papers: Thompson Sampling with a Mixture Prior
In this paper, we prove the first Bayesian regret bounds for Thompson Sampling in reinforcement learning in a multitude of settings. We simplify the learning problem using a discrete set of surrogate environments, and present a refined…
We address multi-armed bandits (MAB) where the objective is to maximize the cumulative reward under a probabilistic linear constraint. For a few real-world instances of this problem, constrained extensions of the well-known Thompson…
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…
Thompson Sampling has been widely used for contextual bandit problems due to the flexibility of its modeling power. However, a general theory for this class of methods in the frequentist setting is still lacking. In this paper, we present a…
This paper studies the Bayesian regret of the Thompson Sampling algorithm for bandit problems, building on the information-theoretic framework introduced by Russo and Van Roy (2015). Specifically, it extends the rate-distortion analysis of…
This note introduce three Bayesian style Multi-armed bandit algorithms: Information-directed sampling, Thompson Sampling and Generalized Thompson Sampling. The goal is to give an intuitive explanation for these three algorithms and their…
We derive an alternative proof for the regret of Thompson sampling (\ts) in the stochastic linear bandit setting. While we obtain a regret bound of order $\widetilde{O}(d^{3/2}\sqrt{T})$ as in previous results, the proof sheds new light on…
We consider the trade-off problem between exploration and exploitation under finite discounted Markov Decision Process, where the state transition matrix of the underlying environment stays unknown. We propose a double Thompson sampling…
Thompson sampling (TS) is one of the most popular and earliest algorithms to solve stochastic multi-armed bandit problems. We consider a variant of TS, named $\alpha$-TS, where we use a fractional or $\alpha$-posterior ($\alpha\in(0,1)$)…
We study the effects of approximate inference on the performance of Thompson sampling in the $k$-armed bandit problems. Thompson sampling is a successful algorithm for online decision-making but requires posterior inference, which often…
Preference feedback, in the form of pairwise comparisons rather than scalar scores, has seen increasing use in applications such as human-, laboratory-, and expert-in-the-loop design, as well as scientific discovery. We propose a Thompson…
We introduce a novel anytime Batched Thompson sampling policy for multi-armed bandits where the agent observes the rewards of her actions and adjusts her policy only at the end of a small number of batches. We show that this policy…
Thompson sampling has emerged as an effective heuristic for a broad range of online decision problems. In its basic form, the algorithm requires computing and sampling from a posterior distribution over models, which is tractable only for…
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…
In this paper, we study bottleneck identification in networks via extracting minimax paths. Many real-world networks have stochastic weights for which full knowledge is not available in advance. Therefore, we model this task as a…
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…
Bayesian optimization in large unstructured discrete spaces is often hindered by the computational cost of maximizing acquisition functions due to the absence of gradients. We propose a scalable alternative based on Thompson sampling that…
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…
Thompson sampling and other Bayesian sequential decision-making algorithms are among the most popular approaches to tackle explore/exploit trade-offs in (contextual) bandits. The choice of prior in these algorithms offers flexibility to…
Offline-to-online learning aims to improve online decision-making by leveraging offline logged data. A central challenge in this setting is the distribution shift between offline and online environments. While some existing works attempt to…