English
Related papers

Related papers: Incentivizing Combinatorial Bandit Exploration

200 papers

We consider online learning problems under a partial observability model capturing situations where the information conveyed to the learner is between full information and bandit feedback. In the simplest variant, we assume that in addition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Tomas Kocak , Gergely Neu , Michal Valko , Remi Munos

Current music recommender systems typically act in a greedy fashion by recommending songs with the highest user ratings. Greedy recommendation, however, is suboptimal over the long term: it does not actively gather information on user…

Multimedia · Computer Science 2013-11-26 Xinxi Wang , Yi Wang , David Hsu , Ye Wang

Increasingly, recommender systems are tasked with improving users' long-term satisfaction. In this context, we study a content exploration task, which we formalize as a bandit problem with delayed rewards. There is an apparent trade-off in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Kelly W. Zhang , Thomas Baldwin-McDonald , Kamil Ciosek , Lucas Maystre , Daniel Russo

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

Bandit algorithms are guaranteed to solve diverse sequential decision-making problems, provided that a sufficient exploration budget is available. However, learning from scratch is often too costly for personalization tasks where a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Newton Mwai , Emil Carlsson , Fredrik D. Johansson

In a fixed-confidence pure exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits, an algorithm iteratively samples arms and should stop as early as possible and return the correct answer to a query about the arms distributions. We are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Adrienne Tuynman , Rémy Degenne

We consider the problem of \emph{influence maximization}, the problem of maximizing the number of people that become aware of a product by finding the `best' set of `seed' users to expose the product to. Most prior work on this topic…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2016-04-28 Sharan Vaswani , Laks. V. S. Lakshmanan , Mark Schmidt

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-25 Li Zhou

We study a stylized social learning dynamics where self-interested agents collectively follow a simple multi-armed bandit protocol. Each agent controls an ``episode": a short sequence of consecutive decisions. Motivating applications…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Kiarash Banihashem , Natalie Collina , Aleksandrs Slivkins

Thompson Sampling (TS) is one of the most effective algorithms for solving contextual multi-armed bandit problems. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, called Neural Thompson Sampling, which adapts deep neural networks for both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Weitong Zhang , Dongruo Zhou , Lihong Li , Quanquan Gu

Thompson sampling is one of the most popular learning algorithms for online sequential decision-making problems and has rich real-world applications. However, current Thompson sampling algorithms are limited by the assumption that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Yinglun Xu , Zhiwei Wang , Gagandeep Singh

Reinforcement learning addresses the dilemma between exploration to find profitable actions and exploitation to act according to the best observations already made. Bandit problems are one such class of problems in stateless environments…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-02-20 Ananda Narayanan B , Balaraman Ravindran

A key feature of sequential decision making under uncertainty is a need to balance between exploiting--choosing the best action according to the current knowledge, and exploring--obtaining information about values of other actions. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-27 Dimitrije Markovic , Hrvoje Stojic , Sarah Schwoebel , Stefan J. Kiebel

We propose algorithms based on a multi-level Thompson sampling scheme, for the stochastic multi-armed bandit and its contextual variant with linear expected rewards, in the setting where arms are clustered. We show, both theoretically and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Emil Carlsson , Devdatt Dubhashi , Fredrik D. Johansson

Contextual bandits are incredibly useful in many practical problems. We go one step further by devising a more realistic problem that combines: (1) contextual bandits with dense arm features, (2) non-linear reward functions, and (3) a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Wei Min Loh , Sajib Kumer Sinha , Ankur Agarwal , Pascal Poupart

Sponsored search positions are typically allocated through real-time auctions, where the outcomes depend on advertisers' quality-adjusted bids - the product of their bids and quality scores. Although quality scoring helps promote ads with…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Mohammad Rashid , Omid Rafieian , Soheil Ghili

Most existing works on federated bandits take it for granted that all clients are altruistic about sharing their data with the server for the collective good whenever needed. Despite their compelling theoretical guarantee on performance and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Zhepei Wei , Chuanhao Li , Haifeng Xu , Hongning Wang

We propose a novel combinatorial stochastic-greedy bandit (SGB) algorithm for combinatorial multi-armed bandit problems when no extra information other than the joint reward of the selected set of $n$ arms at each time step $t\in [T]$ is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Fares Fourati , Christopher John Quinn , Mohamed-Slim Alouini , Vaneet Aggarwal

This work considers a repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal can only interact with her environment through the agent. The principal and the agent have misaligned objectives and the choice of action is only left to the…

We consider Thompson Sampling (TS) for linear combinatorial semi-bandits and subgaussian rewards. We propose the first known TS whose finite-time regret does not scale exponentially with the dimension of the problem. We further show the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-10 Raymond Zhang , Richard Combes