Related papers: Thompson Sampling with Virtual Helping Agents
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…
We study the combinatorial sleeping multi-armed semi-bandit problem with long-term fairness constraints~(CSMAB-F). To address the problem, we adopt Thompson Sampling~(TS) to maximize the total rewards and use virtual queue techniques to…
Restless bandit problems assume time-varying reward distributions of the arms, which adds flexibility to the model but makes the analysis more challenging. We study learning algorithms over the unknown reward distributions and prove a…
In this paper we study a multi-arm bandit problem in which the quality of each arm is measured by the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) at some level alpha of the reward distribution. While existing works in this setting mainly focus on…
In this paper, we consider a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, MAB with cost subsidy, which models many real-life applications where the learning agent has to pay to select an arm and is concerned about optimizing…
Thompson Sampling (TS) and its variants are powerful Multi-Armed Bandit algorithms used to balance exploration and exploitation strategies in active learning. Yet, their probabilistic nature often turns them into a "black box", hindering…
We address online combinatorial optimization when the player has a prior over the adversary's sequence of losses. In this framework, Russo and Van Roy proposed an information-theoretic analysis of Thompson Sampling based on the information…
We consider Thompson sampling for linear bandit problems with finitely many independent arms, where rewards are sampled from normal distributions that are linearly dependent on unknown parameter vectors and with unknown variance.…
Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have made significant strides in performance on applications such as Go and Atari games. However, developing practical methods to balance exploration and exploitation in complex domains remains…
Contextual dueling bandit is used to model the bandit problems, where a learner's goal is to find the best arm for a given context using observed noisy human preference feedback over the selected arms for the past contexts. However,…
Multi-armed bandit methods have been used for dynamic experiments particularly in online services. Among the methods, thompson sampling is widely used because it is simple but shows desirable performance. Many thompson sampling methods for…
The Greedy algorithm is the simplest heuristic in sequential decision problem that carelessly takes the locally optimal choice at each round, disregarding any advantages of exploring and/or information gathering. Theoretically, it is known…
Thompson Sampling is one of the most effective methods for contextual bandits and has been generalized to posterior sampling for certain MDP settings. However, existing posterior sampling methods for reinforcement learning are limited by…
This paper addresses the exploration-exploitation dilemma inherent in decision-making, focusing on multi-armed bandit problems. The problems involve an agent deciding whether to exploit current knowledge for immediate gains or explore new…
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 consider the problem of Active Search, where a maximum of relevant objects - ideally all relevant objects - should be retrieved with the minimum effort or minimum time. Typically, there are two main challenges to face when tackling this…
Given a set of arms $\mathcal{Z}\subset \mathbb{R}^d$ and an unknown parameter vector $\theta_\ast\in\mathbb{R}^d$, the pure exploration linear bandit problem aims to return $\arg\max_{z\in \mathcal{Z}} z^{\top}\theta_{\ast}$, with high…
Multiple machine learning and prediction models are often used for the same prediction or recommendation task. In our recent work, where we develop and deploy airline ancillary pricing models in an online setting, we found that among…
We consider a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting where reward must be actively queried for it to be observed. We provide tight lower and upper problem-dependent guarantees on both the regret and the number of queries. Interestingly, we…
The multi-armed bandit problem forms the foundation for solving a wide range of on-line stochastic optimization problems through a simple, yet effective mechanism. One simply casts the problem as a gambler that repeatedly pulls one out of N…