Related papers: Fast, Precise Thompson Sampling for Bayesian Optim…
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…
Approximate Bayesian computation is an established and popular method for likelihood-free inference with applications in many disciplines. The effectiveness of the method depends critically on the availability of well performing summary…
In Bayesian optimization, Thompson sampling selects the evaluation point by sampling from the posterior distribution over the objective function maximizer. Because this sampling problem is intractable for Gaussian process (GP) surrogates,…
This note introduce three Bayesian style Multi-armed bandit algorithms: Information-directed sampling, Thompson Sampling and Generalized Thompson Sampling. The goal is to give an intuitive explanation for these three algorithms and their…
Thompson sampling (TS) has attracted a lot of interest in the bandit area. It was introduced in the 1930s but has not been theoretically proven until recent years. All of its analysis in the combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) setting…
We study the real-valued combinatorial pure exploration of the multi-armed bandit (R-CPE-MAB) problem. In R-CPE-MAB, a player is given $d$ stochastic arms, and the reward of each arm $s\in\{1, \ldots, d\}$ follows an unknown distribution…
Thompson sampling, a Bayesian method for balancing exploration and exploitation in bandit problems, has theoretical guarantees and exhibits strong empirical performance in many domains. Traditional Thompson sampling, however, assumes…
We study the regret of Thompson sampling (TS) algorithms for exponential family bandits, where the reward distribution is from a one-dimensional exponential family, which covers many common reward distributions including Bernoulli,…
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…
Recent advances in contextual bandit optimization and reinforcement learning have garnered interest in applying these methods to real-world sequential decision making problems. Real-world applications frequently have constraints with…
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…
We consider the best-k-arm identification problem for multi-armed bandits, where the objective is to select the exact set of k arms with the highest mean rewards by sequentially allocating measurement effort. We characterize the necessary…
Multi-armed bandits (MAB) are extensively studied in various settings where the objective is to \textit{maximize} the actions' outcomes (i.e., rewards) over time. Since safety is crucial in many real-world problems, safe versions of MAB…
The literature on bandit learning and regret analysis has focused on contexts where the goal is to converge on an optimal action in a manner that limits exploration costs. One shortcoming imposed by this orientation is that it does not…
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…
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…
Thompson sampling (TS) is a popular heuristic for action selection, but it requires sampling from a posterior distribution. Unfortunately, this can become computationally intractable in complex environments, such as those modeled using…
This paper investigates the best arm identification (BAI) problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits in the fixed confidence setting. The general class of the exponential family of bandits is considered. The existing algorithms for the…
This paper considers the optimal adaptive allocation of measurement effort for identifying the best among a finite set of options or designs. An experimenter sequentially chooses designs to measure and observes noisy signals of their…
In this paper, we propose a Double Thompson Sampling (D-TS) algorithm for dueling bandit problems. As indicated by its name, D-TS selects both the first and the second candidates according to Thompson Sampling. Specifically, D-TS maintains…