Related papers: Thompson Sampling with a Mixture Prior

Thompson sampling (TS) has optimal regret and excellent empirical performance in multi-armed bandit problems. Yet, in Bayesian optimization, TS underperforms popular acquisition functions (e.g., EI, UCB). TS samples arms according to the…

It is oftentimes impossible to understand how machine learning models reach a decision. While recent research has proposed various technical approaches to provide some clues as to how a learning model makes individual decisions, they cannot…

In this paper the problem of learning appropriate bias for an environment of related tasks is examined from a Bayesian perspective. The environment of related tasks is shown to be naturally modelled by the concept of an {\em objective}…

This paper presents a new dynamic approach to experiment design in settings where, due to interference or other concerns, experimental units are coarse. `Region-split' experiments on online platforms are one example of such a setting. The…

Online learning in large-scale structured bandits is known to be challenging due to the curse of dimensionality. In this paper, we propose a unified meta-learning framework for a general class of structured bandit problems where the…

Thompson sampling, a Bayesian method for balancing exploration and exploitation in bandit problems, has theoretical guarantees and exhibits strong empirical performance in many domains. Traditional Thompson sampling, however, assumes…

The empirically successful Thompson Sampling algorithm for stochastic bandits has drawn much interest in understanding its theoretical properties. One important benefit of the algorithm is that it allows domain knowledge to be conveniently…

Denoising diffusion models have driven significant progress in the field of Bayesian inverse problems. Recent approaches use pre-trained diffusion models as priors to solve a wide range of such problems, only leveraging inference-time…

We study the problem of meta-learning several contextual stochastic bandits tasks by leveraging their concentration around a low-dimensional affine subspace, which we learn via online principal component analysis to reduce the expected…

This paper outlines a Bayesian approach to estimate finite mixtures of Tobit models. The method consists of an MCMC approach that combines Gibbs sampling with data augmentation and is simple to implement. I show through simulations that the…

We consider a Bayesian budgeted multi-armed bandit problem, in which each arm consumes a different amount of resources when selected and there is a budget constraint on the total amount of resources that can be used. Budgeted Thompson…

Cold-start exploration is a core challenge in large-scale recommender systems: new or data-sparse items must receive traffic to estimate value, but over-exploration harms users and wastes impressions. In practice, Thompson Sampling (TS) is…

This paper presents a new approach for batch Bayesian Optimization (BO) called Thompson Sampling-Regret to Sigma Ratio directed sampling (TS-RSR), where we sample a new batch of actions by minimizing a Thompson Sampling approximation of a…

We study Thompson Sampling-based algorithms for stochastic bandits with bounded rewards. As the existing problem-dependent regret bound for Thompson Sampling with Gaussian priors [Agrawal and Goyal, 2017] is vacuous when $T \le 288 e^{64}$,…

We consider the exploration-exploitation tradeoff in linear quadratic (LQ) control problems, where the state dynamics is linear and the cost function is quadratic in states and controls. We analyze the regret of Thompson sampling (TS)…

Asynchronous event sequence clustering aims to group similar event sequences in an unsupervised manner. Mixture models of temporal point processes have been proposed to solve this problem, but they often suffer from overfitting, leading to…

Non-stationary multi-armed bandit (NS-MAB) problems have recently received significant attention. NS-MAB are typically modelled in two scenarios: abruptly changing, where reward distributions remain constant for a certain period and change…

Thompson sampling is a widely used strategy for contextual bandits: at each round, it samples a reward function from a Bayesian posterior and acts greedily under that sample. Prior-data fitted networks (PFNs), such as TabPFN v2+ and TabICL…

In this work, we study the performance of the Thompson Sampling algorithm for Contextual Bandit problems based on the framework introduced by Neu et al. and their concept of lifted information ratio. First, we prove a comprehensive bound on…

Online decision making plays a crucial role in numerous real-world applications. In many scenarios, the decision is made based on performing a sequence of tests on the incoming data points. However, performing all tests can be expensive and…