Related papers: Thompson Sampling for (Combinatorial) Pure Explora…
The paper proposes a novel upper confidence bound (UCB) procedure for identifying the arm with the largest mean in a multi-armed bandit game in the fixed confidence setting using a small number of total samples. The procedure cannot be…
Pure exploration (aka active testing) is the fundamental task of sequentially gathering information to answer a query about a stochastic environment. Good algorithms make few mistakes and take few samples. Lower bounds (for multi-armed…
We study a variant of the thresholding bandit problem (TBP) in the context of outlier detection, where the objective is to identify the outliers whose rewards are above a threshold. Distinct from the traditional TBP, the threshold is…
We consider the problem of statistical inference when the data is collected via a Thompson Sampling-type algorithm. While Thompson Sampling (TS) is known to be both asymptotically optimal and empirically effective, its adaptive sampling…
Much of the recent literature on bandit learning focuses on algorithms that aim to converge on an optimal action. One shortcoming is that this orientation does not account for time sensitivity, which can play a crucial role when learning an…
This paper introduces the framework of multi-armed sampling, which serves as the sampling counterpart to the optimization problem of multi-armed bandits. Our primary motivation is to rigorously examine the exploration-exploitation trade-off…
Top Two algorithms arose as an adaptation of Thompson sampling to best arm identification in multi-armed bandit models (Russo, 2016), for parametric families of arms. They select the next arm to sample from by randomizing among two…
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 ($\alpha\in(0,1)$)…
Learning complex robot behavior through interactions with the environment necessitates principled exploration. Effective strategies should prioritize exploring regions of the state-action space that maximize rewards, with optimistic…
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…
We propose $\tt RandUCB$, a bandit strategy that builds on theoretically derived confidence intervals similar to upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms, but akin to Thompson sampling (TS), it uses randomization to trade off exploration and…
We study the Combinatorial Thompson Sampling policy (CTS) for combinatorial multi-armed bandit problems (CMAB), within an approximation regret setting. Although CTS has attracted a lot of interest, it has a drawback that other usual CMAB…
We propose a new strategy for best-arm identification with fixed confidence of Gaussian variables with bounded means and unit variance. This strategy, called Exploration-Biased Sampling, is not only asymptotically optimal: it is to the best…
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…
We study safe linear bandits (SLBs), where an agent selects actions from a convex set to maximize an unknown linear objective subject to unknown linear constraints in each round. Existing methods for SLBs provide strong regret guarantees,…
Combinatorial optimization is one of the fundamental research fields that has been extensively studied in theoretical computer science and operations research. When developing an algorithm for combinatorial optimization, it is commonly…
In this paper, we study sequential decision-making for maximizing the Sharpe ratio (SR) in a stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) setting. Unlike standard bandit formulations that maximize cumulative reward, SR optimization requires…
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…
The prevailing principle of "Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty" advocates for the incorporation of an exploration bonus, generally assumed to be proportional to the inverse square root of the visit count ($1/\sqrt{n}$), where $n$ is the…
A Top Two sampling rule for bandit identification is a method which selects the next arm to sample from among two candidate arms, a leader and a challenger. Due to their simplicity and good empirical performance, they have received…