Related papers: Sample-Mean Anchored Thompson Sampling for Offline…
Thompson Sampling provides an efficient technique to introduce prior knowledge in the multi-armed bandit problem, along with providing remarkable empirical performance. In this paper, we revisit the Thompson Sampling algorithm under rewards…
Cold-start exploration is a core challenge in large-scale recommender systems: new or data-sparse items must receive traffic to estimate value, but over-exploration harms users and wastes impressions. In practice, Thompson Sampling (TS) is…
Thompson sampling (TS) is widely used in sequential decision making due to its ease of use and appealing empirical performance. However, many existing analytical and empirical results for TS rely on restrictive assumptions on reward…
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 propose algorithms based on a multi-level Thompson sampling scheme, for the stochastic multi-armed bandit and its contextual variant with linear expected rewards, in the setting where arms are clustered. We show, both theoretically and…
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…
It has been recently shown in the literature that the sample averages from online learning experiments are biased when used to estimate the mean reward. To correct the bias, off-policy evaluation methods, including importance sampling and…
Traditional randomized A/B experiments assign arms with uniform random (UR) probability, such as 50/50 assignment to two versions of a website to discover whether one version engages users more. To more quickly and automatically use data to…
Existing methods of combinatorial pure exploration mainly focus on the UCB approach. To make the algorithm efficient, they usually use the sum of upper confidence bounds within arm set $S$ to represent the upper confidence bound of $S$,…
To maintain the accuracy of supervised learning models in the presence of evolving data streams, we provide temporally-biased sampling schemes that weight recent data most heavily, with inclusion probabilities for a given data item decaying…
Thompson Sampling is one of the most widely used and studied bandit algorithms, known for its simple structure, low regret performance, and solid theoretical guarantees. Yet, in stark contrast to most other families of bandit algorithms,…
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…
We investigate finite stochastic partial monitoring, which is a general model for sequential learning with limited feedback. While Thompson sampling is one of the most promising algorithms on a variety of online decision-making problems,…
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…
The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a classical learning task that exemplifies the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. However, standard formulations do not take into account {\em risk}. In online decision making systems, risk is a…
We consider the problem of statistical inference when the data is collected via a Thompson Sampling-type algorithm. While Thompson Sampling (TS) is known to be both asymptotically optimal and empirically effective, its adaptive sampling…
Conducting randomized experiments in education settings raises the question of how we can use machine learning techniques to improve educational interventions. Using Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) algorithms like Thompson Sampling (TS) in…
How can we make use of information parallelism in online decision making problems while efficiently balancing the exploration-exploitation trade-off? In this paper, we introduce a batch Thompson Sampling framework for two canonical online…
In algorithm optimization in reinforcement learning, how to deal with the exploration-exploitation dilemma is particularly important. Multi-armed bandit problem can optimize the proposed solutions by changing the reward distribution to…
The design and performance analysis of bandit algorithms in the presence of stage-wise safety or reliability constraints has recently garnered significant interest. In this work, we consider the linear stochastic bandit problem under…