Related papers: Adaptive Data Augmentation for Thompson Sampling
Taking advantage of contextual information can potentially boost the performance of recommender systems. In the era of big data, such side information often has several dimensions. Thus, developing decision-making algorithms to cope with…
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…
Contextual bandits serve as a fundamental model for many sequential decision making tasks. The most popular theoretically justified approaches are based on the optimism principle. While these algorithms can be practical, they are known to…
In this paper we consider the contextual multi-armed bandit problem for linear payoffs under a risk-averse criterion. At each round, contexts are revealed for each arm, and the decision maker chooses one arm to pull and receives the…
In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective…
We study the problem of finding the optimal dosage in early stage clinical trials through the multi-armed bandit lens. We advocate the use of the Thompson Sampling principle, a flexible algorithm that can accommodate different types of…
Thompson Sampling algorithm is a well known Bayesian algorithm for solving stochastic multi-armed bandit. At each time step the algorithm chooses each arm with probability proportional to it being the current best arm. We modify the…
We consider Thompson sampling for linear bandit problems with finitely many independent arms, where rewards are sampled from normal distributions that are linearly dependent on unknown parameter vectors and with unknown variance.…
We propose the first fully-adaptive algorithm for pure exploration in linear bandits---the task to find the arm with the largest expected reward, which depends on an unknown parameter linearly. While existing methods partially or entirely…
Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…
Thompson Sampling is one of the oldest heuristics for multi-armed bandit problems. It is a randomized algorithm based on Bayesian ideas, and has recently generated significant interest after several studies demonstrated it to have better…
Contextual bandits are widely-used in the study of learning-based control policies for finite action spaces. While the problem is well-studied for bandits with perfectly observed context vectors, little is known about the case of…
We study nonparametric contextual bandits under batch constraints, where the expected reward for each action is modeled as a smooth function of covariates, and the policy updates are made at the end of each batch of observations. We…
This work explores the idea of a causal contextual multi-armed bandit approach to automated marketing, where we estimate and optimize the causal (incremental) effects. Focusing on causal effect leads to better return on investment (ROI) by…
We study the Bayesian regret of the renowned Thompson Sampling algorithm in contextual bandits with binary losses and adversarially-selected contexts. We adapt the information-theoretic perspective of \cite{RvR16} to the contextual setting…
Originally motivated by default risk management applications, this paper investigates a novel problem, referred to as the profitable bandit problem here. At each step, an agent chooses a subset of the K possible actions. For each action…
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…
We advance the study of incentivized bandit exploration, in which arm choices are viewed as recommendations and are required to be Bayesian incentive compatible. Recent work has shown under certain independence assumptions that after…
In this paper, we consider online learning in generalized linear contextual bandits where rewards are not immediately observed. Instead, rewards are available to the decision-maker only after some delay, which is unknown and stochastic. We…
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…