Related papers: Thompson Sampling-like Algorithms for Stochastic R…
We discuss a multiple-play multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem in which several arms are selected at each round. Recently, Thompson sampling (TS), a randomized algorithm with a Bayesian spirit, has attracted much attention for its empirically…
We study Thompson Sampling-based algorithms for stochastic bandits with bounded rewards. As the existing problem-dependent regret bound for Thompson Sampling with Gaussian priors [Agrawal and Goyal, 2017] is vacuous when $T \le 288 e^{64}$,…
We consider stochastic multi-armed bandit problems with complex actions over a set of basic arms, where the decision maker plays a complex action rather than a basic arm in each round. The reward of the complex action is some function of…
Contextual bandits constitute a classical framework for decision-making under uncertainty. In this setting, the goal is to learn the arms of highest reward subject to contextual information, while the unknown reward parameters of each arm…
This paper studies the one-shot behavior of no-regret algorithms for stochastic bandits. Although many algorithms are known to be asymptotically optimal with respect to the expected regret, over a single run, their pseudo-regret seems to…
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,…
Non-stationary multi-armed bandit (NS-MAB) problems have recently received significant attention. NS-MAB are typically modelled in two scenarios: abruptly changing, where reward distributions remain constant for a certain period and change…
This work tackles the complexities of multi-player scenarios in \emph{unknown games}, where the primary challenge lies in navigating the uncertainty of the environment through bandit feedback alongside strategic decision-making. We…
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 ($\alpha\in(0,1)$)…
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…
In this paper we propose a general methodology to derive regret bounds for randomized multi-armed bandit algorithms. It consists in checking a set of sufficient conditions on the sampling probability of each arm and on the family of…
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…
Stochastic Rank-One Bandits (Katarya et al, (2017a,b)) are a simple framework for regret minimization problems over rank-one matrices of arms. The initially proposed algorithms are proved to have logarithmic regret, but do not match the…
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…
We consider model selection in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. Given a set of base learning algorithms, an effective model selection strategy adapts to the best learning algorithm in an online fashion. We show that by…
Much of the recent literature on bandit learning focuses on algorithms that aim to converge on an optimal action. One shortcoming is that this orientation does not account for time sensitivity, which can play a crucial role when learning an…
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…
Motivated by economic applications such as recommender systems, we study the behavior of stochastic bandits algorithms under \emph{strategic behavior} conducted by rational actors, i.e., the arms. Each arm is a \emph{self-interested}…
We propose $\tt RandUCB$, a bandit strategy that builds on theoretically derived confidence intervals similar to upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithms, but akin to Thompson sampling (TS), it uses randomization to trade off exploration and…
Thompson Sampling has been widely used for contextual bandit problems due to the flexibility of its modeling power. However, a general theory for this class of methods in the frequentist setting is still lacking. In this paper, we present a…