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We address the problem of regret minimization in logistic contextual bandits, where a learner decides among sequential actions or arms given their respective contexts to maximize binary rewards. Using a fast inference procedure with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-22 Bianca Dumitrascu , Karen Feng , Barbara E Engelhardt

Motivated by the pressing need for efficient optimization in online recommender systems, we revisit the cascading bandit model proposed by Kveton et al. (2015). While Thompson sampling (TS) algorithms have been shown to be empirically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Zixin Zhong , Wang Chi Cheung , Vincent Y. F. Tan

We study stage-wise conservative linear stochastic bandits: an instance of bandit optimization, which accounts for (unknown) safety constraints that appear in applications such as online advertising and medical trials. At each stage, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-02 Ahmadreza Moradipari , Christos Thrampoulidis , Mahnoosh Alizadeh

We address multi-armed bandits (MAB) where the objective is to maximize the cumulative reward under a probabilistic linear constraint. For a few real-world instances of this problem, constrained extensions of the well-known Thompson…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-14 Vidit Saxena , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Joakim Jaldén

Thompson sampling (TS) is one of the most popular exploration techniques in reinforcement learning (RL). However, most TS algorithms with theoretical guarantees are difficult to implement and not generalizable to Deep RL. While the emerging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Haque Ishfaq , Yixin Tan , Yu Yang , Qingfeng Lan , Jianfeng Lu , A. Rupam Mahmood , Doina Precup , Pan Xu

In this paper, we introduce and analyze a variant of the Thompson sampling (TS) algorithm for contextual bandits. At each round, traditional TS requires samples from the current posterior distribution, which is usually intractable. To…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-23 Pierre Clavier , Tom Huix , Alain Durmus

We propose an adaptively weighted stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics algorithm (SGLD), so-called contour stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (CSGLD), for Bayesian learning in big data statistics. The proposed algorithm is essentially a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-05-24 Wei Deng , Guang Lin , Faming Liang

Meta-learning is characterized by its ability to learn how to learn, enabling the adaptation of learning strategies across different tasks. Recent research introduced the Meta-Thompson Sampling (Meta-TS), which meta-learns an unknown prior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-09-12 Hao Li , Dong Liang , Zheng Xie

We consider the stochastic linear contextual bandit problem with high-dimensional features. We analyze the Thompson sampling algorithm using special classes of sparsity-inducing priors (e.g., spike-and-slab) to model the unknown parameter…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-31 Sunrit Chakraborty , Saptarshi Roy , Ambuj Tewari

Thompson sampling is a heuristic algorithm for the multi-armed bandit problem which has a long tradition in machine learning. The algorithm has a Bayesian spirit in the sense that it selects arms based on posterior samples of reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Yi Liu , Veronika Rockova

In this paper, we study sequential decision-making for maximizing the Sharpe ratio (SR) in a stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) setting. Unlike standard bandit formulations that maximize cumulative reward, SR optimization requires…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Mohammad Taha Shah , Sabrina Khurshid , Gourab Ghatak

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Ilker Demirel , Mehmet Ufuk Ozdemir , Cem Tekin

Variance-dependent regret bounds have received increasing attention in recent studies on contextual bandits. However, most of these studies are focused on upper confidence bound (UCB)-based bandit algorithms, while sampling based bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Xuheng Li , Quanquan Gu

We study the Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) algorithm for non-convex optimization. The algorithm performs stochastic gradient descent, where in each step it injects appropriately scaled Gaussian noise to the update. We analyze…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-10 Yuchen Zhang , Percy Liang , Moses Charikar

We study a type of Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problems in which arms with a Gaussian reward feedback are clustered. Such an arm setting finds applications in many real-world problems, for example, mmWave communications and portfolio…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Tianchi Zhao , He Liu , Hongyin Shi , Jinliang Li

We provide a new convergence analysis of stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) for sampling from a class of distributions that can be non-log-concave. At the core of our approach is a novel conductance analysis of SGLD using an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Difan Zou , Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu

Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) has emerged as a key MCMC algorithm for Bayesian learning from large scale datasets. While SGLD with decreasing step sizes converges weakly to the posterior distribution, the algorithm is often…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-11-27 Nicolas Brosse , Alain Durmus , Eric Moulines

We consider a non-stationary two-armed bandit framework and propose a change-detection based Thompson sampling (TS) algorithm, named TS with change-detection (TS-CD), to keep track of the dynamic environment. The non-stationarity is modeled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-09 Gourab Ghatak

We propose a stochastic approximation (SA) based method with randomization of samples for policy evaluation using the least squares temporal difference (LSTD) algorithm. Our proposed scheme is equivalent to running regular temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-27 L. A. Prashanth , Nathaniel Korda , Rémi Munos

One way to avoid overfitting in machine learning is to use model parameters distributed according to a Bayesian posterior given the data, rather than the maximum likelihood estimator. Stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) is one…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-12-05 Gaétan Marceau-Caron , Yann Ollivier