Related papers: Contextual Thompson Sampling via Generation of Mis…
Thompson sampling (TS) is one of the most popular and earliest algorithms to solve stochastic multi-armed bandit problems. We consider a variant of TS, named $\alpha$-TS, where we use a fractional or $\alpha$-posterior ($\alpha\in(0,1)$)…
We design and implement an adaptive experiment (a ``contextual bandit'') to learn a targeted treatment assignment policy, where the goal is to use a participant's survey responses to determine which charity to expose them to in a donation…
We study safe linear bandits (SLBs), where an agent selects actions from a convex set to maximize an unknown linear objective subject to unknown linear constraints in each round. Existing methods for SLBs provide strong regret guarantees,…
Contextual sequential decision-making problems play a crucial role in machine learning, encompassing a wide range of downstream applications such as bandits, sequential hypothesis testing and online risk control. These applications often…
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…
We consider a sequential assortment selection problem where the user choice is given by a multinomial logit (MNL) choice model whose parameters are unknown. In each period, the learning agent observes a $d$-dimensional contextual…
Ranking algorithms are fundamental to various online platforms across e-commerce sites to content streaming services. Our research addresses the challenge of adaptively ranking items from a candidate pool for heterogeneous users, a key…
We investigate contextual bandits in the presence of side-observations across arms in order to design recommendation algorithms for users connected via social networks. Users in social networks respond to their friends' activity, and hence…
Most bandit algorithms assume that the reward variances or their upper bounds are known, and that they are the same for all arms. This naturally leads to suboptimal performance and higher regret due to variance overestimation. On the other…
We study the use of policy gradient algorithms to optimize over a class of generalized Thompson sampling policies. Our central insight is to view the posterior parameter sampled by Thompson sampling as a kind of pseudo-action. Policy…
We investigate the extent to which offline demonstration data can improve online learning. It is natural to expect some improvement, but the question is how, and by how much? We show that the degree of improvement must depend on the quality…
We provide an approach for the analysis of randomised exploration algorithms like Thompson sampling that does not rely on forced optimism or posterior inflation. With this, we demonstrate that in the $d$-dimensional linear bandit setting,…
We study the contextual multi-armed bandit problem with a finite context space (a.k.a. subpopulations), where the learner recommends a best action for each context and is evaluated by context-weighted simple regret. Our guarantees are…
To address the contextual bandit problem, we propose an online random forest algorithm. The analysis of the proposed algorithm is based on the sample complexity needed to find the optimal decision stump. Then, the decision stumps are…
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…
We consider Thompson Sampling (TS) for linear combinatorial semi-bandits and subgaussian rewards. We propose the first known TS whose finite-time regret does not scale exponentially with the dimension of the problem. We further show the…
Recent growing adoption of experimentation in practice has led to a surge of attention to multiarmed bandits as a technique to reduce the opportunity cost of online experiments. In this setting, a decision-maker sequentially chooses among a…
We study budget-constrained contextual bandits with adversarial contexts, where each action yields a random reward and incurs a random cost. We adopt the standard realizability assumption: conditioned on the observed context, rewards and…
We consider the kernelized contextual bandit problem with a large feature space. This problem involves $K$ arms, and the goal of the forecaster is to maximize the cumulative rewards through learning the relationship between the contexts and…
This paper investigates the challenges of optimal online policy learning under missing data. State-of-the-art algorithms implicitly assume that rewards are always observable. I show that when rewards are missing at random, the Upper…