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Thompson Sampling (TS) has attracted a lot of interest due to its good empirical performance, in particular in the computational advertising. Though successful, the tools for its performance analysis appeared only recently. In this paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Tomas Kocak , Michal Valko , Remi Munos , Shipra Agrawal

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 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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Amin Karbasi , Nikki Lijing Kuang , Yi-An Ma , Siddharth Mitra

Contextual bandits are widely-used in the study of learning-based control policies for finite action spaces. While the problem is well-studied for bandits with perfectly observed context vectors, little is known about the case of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-03 Hongju Park , Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh

We introduce a framework for Thompson sampling (TS) contextual bandit algorithms, in which the algorithm's ability to quantify uncertainty and make decisions depends on the quality of a generative model that is learned offline. Instead of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Kelly W. Zhang , Tiffany Tianhui Cai , Hongseok Namkoong , Daniel Russo

Bandit algorithms sequentially accumulate data using adaptive sampling policies, offering flexibility for real-world applications. However, excessive sampling can be costly, motivating the devolopment of early stopping methods and reliable…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-02-06 Zihan Cui

We consider online sequential decision problems where an agent must balance exploration and exploitation. We derive a set of Bayesian `optimistic' policies which, in the stochastic multi-armed bandit case, includes the Thompson sampling…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-01 Brendan O'Donoghue , Tor Lattimore

Thompson Sampling provides an efficient technique to introduce prior knowledge in the multi-armed bandit problem, along with providing remarkable empirical performance. In this paper, we revisit the Thompson Sampling algorithm under rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-09 Abhimanyu Dubey , Alex Pentland

Thompson sampling is an efficient algorithm for sequential decision making, which exploits the posterior uncertainty to address the exploration-exploitation dilemma. There has been significant recent interest in integrating Bayesian neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-07 Zhendong Wang , Mingyuan Zhou

In this paper we consider Thompson Sampling (TS) for combinatorial semi-bandits. We demonstrate that, perhaps surprisingly, TS is sub-optimal for this problem in the sense that its regret scales exponentially in the ambient dimension, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-22 Raymond Zhang , Richard Combes

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-05 Sébastien Bubeck , Mark Sellke

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-23 Pierre Perrault

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-16 My Phan , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Justin Domke

This paper studies the stochastic linear bandit problem, where a decision-maker chooses actions from possibly time-dependent sets of vectors in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and receives noisy rewards. The objective is to minimize regret, the difference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-24 Nima Hamidi , Mohsen Bayati

Thompson Sampling is one of the oldest heuristics for multi-armed bandit problems. It is a randomized algorithm based on Bayesian ideas, and has recently generated significant interest after several studies demonstrated it to have better…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-09-18 Shipra Agrawal , Navin Goyal

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Dorian Baudry , Romain Gautron , Emilie Kaufmann , Odalric-Ambryn Maillard

We derive an alternative proof for the regret of Thompson sampling (\ts) in the stochastic linear bandit setting. While we obtain a regret bound of order $\widetilde{O}(d^{3/2}\sqrt{T})$ as in previous results, the proof sheds new light on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-06 Marc Abeille , Alessandro Lazaric

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

Ensemble sampling serves as a practical approximation to Thompson sampling when maintaining an exact posterior distribution over model parameters is computationally intractable. In this paper, we establish a regret bound that ensures…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Chao Qin , Zheng Wen , Xiuyuan Lu , Benjamin Van Roy