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Related papers: Discounted Thompson Sampling for Non-Stationary Ba…

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Non-stationary multi-armed bandits enable agents to adapt to changing environments by incorporating mechanisms to detect and respond to shifts in reward distributions, making them well-suited for dynamic settings. However, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Shaoang Li , Jian Li

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Mohammad Taha Shah , Sabrina Khurshid , Gourab Ghatak

We investigate experiments that are designed to select a treatment arm for population deployment. Multi-armed bandit algorithms can enhance efficiency by dynamically allocating measurement effort towards higher performing arms based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-29 Chao Qin , Daniel Russo

The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a classical learning task that exemplifies the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. However, standard formulations do not take into account {\em risk}. In online decision making systems, risk is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Qiuyu Zhu , Vincent Y. F. Tan

Most existing approximate Thompson Sampling (TS) algorithms for multi-armed bandits use Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) or its variants in each round to sample from the posterior, relaxing the need for conjugacy assumptions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Weixin Wang , Haoyang Zheng , Guang Lin , Wei Deng , Pan Xu

A challenging aspect of the bandit problem is that a stochastic reward is observed only for the chosen arm and the rewards of other arms remain missing. The dependence of the arm choice on the past context and reward pairs compounds the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-02 Wonyoung Kim , Gi-soo Kim , Myunghee Cho Paik

The stochastic multi-arm bandit problem has been extensively studied under standard assumptions on the arm's distribution (e.g bounded with known support, exponential family, etc). These assumptions are suitable for many real-world problems…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-19 Dorian Baudry , Patrick Saux , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard

We study a type of Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problems in which arms with a Gaussian reward feedback are clustered. Such an arm setting finds applications in many real-world problems, for example, mmWave communications and portfolio…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Tianchi Zhao , He Liu , Hongyin Shi , Jinliang Li

In stochastic bandit problems, a Bayesian policy called Thompson sampling (TS) has recently attracted much attention for its excellent empirical performance. However, the theoretical analysis of this policy is difficult and its asymptotic…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-11-11 Junya Honda , Akimichi Takemura

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Shuqing Shi , Xiaobin Wang , Zhiyou Yang , Fan Zhang , Hong Qu

During online decision making in Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB), one needs to conduct inference on the true mean reward of each arm based on data collected so far at each step. However, since the arms are adaptively selected--thereby yielding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-29 Maria Dimakopoulou , Zhimei Ren , Zhengyuan Zhou

We consider the contextual bandit problem, where a player sequentially makes decisions based on past observations to maximize the cumulative reward. Although many algorithms have been proposed for contextual bandit, most of them rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Qin Ding , Cho-Jui Hsieh , James Sharpnack

We study the problem of regret minimization in a multi-armed bandit setup where the agent is allowed to play multiple arms at each round by spreading the resources usually allocated to only one arm. At each iteration the agent selects a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Matias I. Müller , Cristian R. Rojas

Stochastic rising rested bandit (SRRB) is a setting where the arms' expected rewards increase as they are pulled. It models scenarios in which the performances of the different options grow as an effect of an underlying learning process…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-21 Marco Fiandri , Alberto Maria Metelli , Francesco Trovò

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-08-26 Iñigo Urteaga , Chris H. Wiggins

We address the problem of regret minimization in logistic contextual bandits, where a learner decides among sequential actions or arms given their respective contexts to maximize binary rewards. Using a fast inference procedure with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-22 Bianca Dumitrascu , Karen Feng , Barbara E Engelhardt

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Zixin Zhong , Wang Chi Cheung , Vincent Y. F. Tan

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-15 Zhiming Huang , Yifan Xu , Bingshan Hu , Qipeng Wang , Jianping Pan

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), multi-armed Bandit (MAB) problems have found applications across diverse domains such as recommender systems, healthcare, and finance. Traditional MAB algorithms typically assume stationary reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Gustavo de Freitas Fonseca , Lucas Coelho e Silva , Paulo André Lima de Castro

In this paper, we consider stochastic multi-armed bandits (MABs) with heavy-tailed rewards, whose $p$-th moment is bounded by a constant $\nu_{p}$ for $1<p\leq2$. First, we propose a novel robust estimator which does not require $\nu_{p}$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Kyungjae Lee , Hongjun Yang , Sungbin Lim , Songhwai Oh