Related papers: Sliding-Window Thompson Sampling for Non-Stationar…

Motivated by the fact that humans like some level of unpredictability or novelty, and might therefore get quickly bored when interacting with a stationary policy, we introduce a novel non-stationary bandit problem, where the expected reward…

One of the key drivers of complexity in the classical (stochastic) multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is the difference between mean rewards in the top two arms, also known as the instance gap. The celebrated Upper Confidence Bound (UCB)…

We study $K$-armed bandit problems where the reward distributions of the arms are all supported on the $[0,1]$ interval. It has been a challenge to design regret-efficient randomized exploration algorithms in this setting. Maillard sampling…

Multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a class of online learning problems where a learning agent aims to maximize its expected cumulative reward while repeatedly selecting to pull arms with unknown reward distributions. We consider a scenario where…

We study an infinite-armed bandit problem where actions' mean rewards are initially sampled from a reservoir distribution. Most prior works in this setting focused on stationary rewards (Berry et al., 1997; Wang et al., 2008; Bonald and…

We consider stochastic bandit problems with a continuous set of arms and where the expected reward is a continuous and unimodal function of the arm. No further assumption is made regarding the smoothness and the structure of the expected…

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…

We consider the exploration-exploitation tradeoff in linear quadratic (LQ) control problems, where the state dynamics is linear and the cost function is quadratic in states and controls. We analyze the regret of Thompson sampling (TS)…

Thompson sampling has proven effective across a wide range of stationary bandit environments. However, as we demonstrate in this paper, it can perform poorly when applied to non-stationary environments. We attribute such failures to the…

We consider a contextual combinatorial bandit problem where in each round a learning agent selects a subset of arms and receives feedback on the selected arms according to their scores. The score of an arm is an unknown function of the…

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,…

Thompson sampling (TS) is a powerful and widely used strategy for sequential decision-making, with applications ranging from Bayesian optimization to reinforcement learning (RL). Despite its success, the theoretical foundations of TS remain…

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to improve the performance of a primary task by jointly learning with related auxiliary tasks. Traditional MTL methods select tasks randomly during training. However, both previous studies and our results…

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…

The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a ubiquitous decision-making problem that exemplifies exploration-exploitation tradeoff. Standard formulations exclude risk in decision making. Risknotably complicates the basic reward-maximising…

In many applications of online decision making, the environment is non-stationary and it is therefore crucial to use bandit algorithms that handle changes. Most existing approaches are designed to protect against non-smooth changes,…

We study the stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem with random delays in the feedback received by the algorithm. We consider two settings: the reward-dependent delay setting, where realized delays may depend on the stochastic rewards,…

This paper considers the use of a simple posterior sampling algorithm to balance between exploration and exploitation when learning to optimize actions such as in multi-armed bandit problems. The algorithm, also known as Thompson Sampling,…

We consider a non-stationary formulation of the stochastic multi-armed bandit where the rewards are no longer assumed to be identically distributed. For the best-arm identification task, we introduce a version of Successive Elimination…

In this paper, we propose a Thompson Sampling algorithm for \emph{unimodal} bandits, where the expected reward is unimodal over the partially ordered arms. To exploit the unimodal structure better, at each step, instead of exploration from…