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In the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, a randomized probability matching policy called Thompson sampling (TS) has shown excellent performance in various reward models. In addition to the empirical performance, TS has been shown to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Jongyeong Lee , Junya Honda , Chao-Kai Chiang , Masashi Sugiyama

This paper explores adaptive variance reduction methods for stochastic optimization based on the STORM technique. Existing adaptive extensions of STORM rely on strong assumptions like bounded gradients and bounded function values, or suffer…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-24 Wei Jiang , Sifan Yang , Yibo Wang , Lijun Zhang

Thompson sampling is a popular algorithm for solving multi-armed bandit problems, and has been applied in a wide range of applications, from website design to portfolio optimization. In such applications, however, the number of choices (or…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-01-19 Simon Mak , Yuanshuo Zhou , Lavonne Hoang , C. F. Jeff Wu

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-02 Wonyoung Kim , Gi-soo Kim , Myunghee Cho Paik

Isotonic regression or monotone function estimation is a problem of estimating function values under monotonicity constraints, which appears naturally in many scientific fields. This paper proposes a new Bayesian method with global-local…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-07 Ryo Okano , Yasuyuki Hamura , Kaoru Irie , Shonosuke Sugasawa

Preference feedback, in the form of pairwise comparisons rather than scalar scores, has seen increasing use in applications such as human-, laboratory-, and expert-in-the-loop design, as well as scientific discovery. We propose a Thompson…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-29 Joseph Lazzaro , Davide Buffelli , Da-shan Shiu , Sattar Vakili

This paper investigates estimating the variance of a temporal-difference learning agent's update target. Most reinforcement learning methods use an estimate of the value function, which captures how good it is for the agent to be in a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-15 Craig Sherstan , Brendan Bennett , Kenny Young , Dylan R. Ashley , Adam White , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton

Recently, it has been shown how sampling actions from the predictive distribution over the optimal action-sometimes called Thompson sampling-can be applied to solve sequential adaptive control problems, when the optimal policy is known for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-09-24 Pedro A. Ortega , Daniel A. Braun

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 consider a continuous-time multi-arm bandit problem (CTMAB), where the learner can sample arms any number of times in a given interval and obtain a random reward from each sample, however, increasing the frequency of sampling incurs an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Rahul Vaze , Manjesh K. Hanawal

We revisit the Thompson sampling algorithm to control an unknown linear quadratic (LQ) system recently proposed by Ouyang et al (arXiv:1709.04047). The regret bound of the algorithm was derived under a technical assumption on the induced…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-09-21 Mukul Gagrani , Sagar Sudhakara , Aditya Mahajan , Ashutosh Nayyar , Yi Ouyang

Thompson sampling is a widely used strategy for contextual bandits: at each round, it samples a reward function from a Bayesian posterior and acts greedily under that sample. Prior-data fitted networks (PFNs), such as TabPFN v2+ and TabICL…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-12 Yan Shuo Tan , Kenyon Ng , Ruizhe Deng , Sumetha Loganathan , Qiong Zhang , Bibhas Chakraborty

The problem of two-sided matching markets has a wide range of real-world applications and has been extensively studied in the literature. A line of recent works have focused on the problem setting where the preferences of one-side market…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Fang Kong , Junming Yin , Shuai Li

Adaptively collected data has become ubiquitous within modern practice. However, even seemingly benign adaptive sampling schemes can introduce severe biases, rendering traditional statistical inference tools inapplicable. This can be…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-12-02 Wei Fan , Kevin Tan , Yuting Wei

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-22 Junpei Komiyama , Junya Honda , Hiroshi Nakagawa

The stochastic multi-arm bandit problem has been extensively studied under standard assumptions on the arm's distribution (e.g bounded with known support, exponential family, etc). These assumptions are suitable for many real-world problems…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-19 Dorian Baudry , Patrick Saux , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard

Thompson sampling (TS) is a Bayesian randomized exploration strategy that samples options (e.g., system parameters or control laws) from the current posterior and then applies the selected option that is optimal for a task, thereby…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Kaikai Zheng , Dawei Shi , Yang Shi , Long Wang

Response-adaptive randomization (RAR) methods can be used to adapt randomization probabilities based on accumulating data, aiming to increase the probability of allocating patients to effective treatments. A popular RAR method is Thompson…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-10 Samuel Pawel , Leonhard Held

In this paper, inspired from our previous algorithm, which was based on the theory of Tsallis statistical mechanics, we develop a new evolving stochastic learning algorithm for neural networks. The new algorithm combines deterministic and…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2009-11-11 Aristoklis D. Anastasiadis , George D. Magoulas

Bandit algorithms are increasingly used in real-world sequential decision-making problems. Associated with this is an increased desire to be able to use the resulting datasets to answer scientific questions like: Did one type of ad lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Kelly W. Zhang , Lucas Janson , Susan A. Murphy