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We aim to efficiently allocate a fixed simulation budget to identify the top-mc designs for each context among a finite number of contexts. The performance of each design under a context is measured by an identifiable statistical…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-07-03 Xinbo Shi , Yijie Peng , Gongbo Zhang

Thompson Sampling (TS) is widely used to address the exploration/exploitation tradeoff in contextual bandits, yet recent theory shows that it does not explore aggressively enough in high-dimensional problems. Feel-Good Thompson Sampling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Emile Anand , Sarah Liaw

We consider Bayesian optimization of expensive-to-evaluate experiments that generate vector-valued outcomes over which a decision-maker (DM) has preferences. These preferences are encoded by a utility function that is not known in closed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-23 Zhiyuan Jerry Lin , Raul Astudillo , Peter I. Frazier , Eytan Bakshy

Preferential Bayesian optimization (PBO) is a framework for optimizing a decision-maker's latent preferences over available design choices. While preferences often involve multiple conflicting objectives, existing work in PBO assumes that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Raul Astudillo , Kejun Li , Maegan Tucker , Chu Xin Cheng , Aaron D. Ames , Yisong Yue

We study Thompson sampling (TS) in online decision making, where the uncertain environment is sampled from a mixture distribution. This is relevant in multi-task learning, where a learning agent faces different classes of problems. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Joey Hong , Branislav Kveton , Manzil Zaheer , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Craig Boutilier

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

Bayesian optimization (BO) has well-documented merits for optimizing black-box functions with an expensive evaluation cost. Such functions emerge in applications as diverse as hyperparameter tuning, drug discovery, and robotics. BO hinges…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-28 Qin Lu , Konstantinos D. Polyzos , Bingcong Li , Georgios B. Giannakis

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 $T \le 288 e^{64}$,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Bingshan Hu , Zhiming Huang , Tianyue H. Zhang , Mathias Lécuyer , Nidhi Hegde

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

Thompson sampling has become a ubiquitous approach to online decision problems with bandit feedback. The key algorithmic task for Thompson sampling is drawing a sample from the posterior of the optimal action. We propose an alternative arm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-05 Jackie Baek , Vivek F. Farias

We study the problem of online multi-task learning where the tasks are performed within similar but not necessarily identical multi-armed bandit environments. In particular, we study how a learner can improve its overall performance across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zhi Wang , Chicheng Zhang , Kamalika Chaudhuri

We study the problem of preferential Bayesian optimization (BO), where we aim to optimize a black-box function with only preference feedback over a pair of candidate solutions. Inspired by the likelihood ratio idea, we construct a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Wenjie Xu , Wenbin Wang , Yuning Jiang , Bratislav Svetozarevic , Colin N. Jones

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-10 Raymond Zhang , Richard Combes

In this paper, we propose a new recommendation algorithm for addressing the problem of two-sided online matching markets with complementary preferences and quota constraints, where agents' preferences are unknown a priori and must be…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-30 Yuantong Li , Guang Cheng , Xiaowu Dai

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 Bayesian optimization, Thompson sampling selects the evaluation point by sampling from the posterior distribution over the objective function maximizer. Because this sampling problem is intractable for Gaussian process (GP) surrogates,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Donney Fan , Geoff Pleiss

Scientific experiments are usually expensive due to complex experimental preparation and processing. Experimental design is therefore involved with the task of finding the optimal experimental input that results in the desirable output by…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-27 Cheng Li , Sunil Gupta , Santu Rana , Vu Nguyen , Antonio Robles-Kelly , Svetha Venkatesh

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

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a widely-used sequential method for zeroth-order optimization of complex and expensive-to-compute black-box functions. The existing BO methods assume that the function evaluation (feedback) is available to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Arun Verma , Zhongxiang Dai , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

We study a widely used Bayesian optimization method, Gaussian process Thompson sampling (GP-TS), under the assumption that the objective function is a sample path from a GP. Compared with the GP upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-11 Shion Takeno , Shogo Iwazaki