A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
Thompson sampling provides a solution to bandit problems in which new observations are allocated to arms with the posterior probability that an arm is optimal. While sometimes easy to implement and asymptotically optimal, Thompson sampling can be computationally demanding in large scale bandit problems, and its perform…
Thompson sampling, a Bayesian method for balancing exploration and exploitation in bandit problems, has theoretical guarantees and exhibits strong empirical performance in many domains. Traditional Thompson sampling, however, assumes perfect compliance, where an agent's chosen action is treated as the implemented actio…
Thompson Sampling, one of the oldest heuristics for solving multi-armed bandits, has recently been shown to demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. The empirical success has led to great interests in theoretical understanding of this heuristic. In this paper, we approach this problem in a way very different from exis…
Thompson sampling is an efficient algorithm for sequential decision making, which exploits the posterior uncertainty to address the exploration-exploitation dilemma. There has been significant recent interest in integrating Bayesian neural networks into Thompson sampling. Most of these methods rely on global variable u…
Thompson sampling has impressive empirical performance for many multi-armed bandit problems. But current algorithms for Thompson sampling only work for the case of conjugate priors since these algorithms require to infer the posterior, which is often computationally intractable when the prior is not conjugate. In this …
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 each possible environment. The predictive distribution can then be constructed b…
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 drawn from symmetric α-stable distributions, which are a class of heavy-taile…
Thompson Sampling bounds for contextual bandits with sub-Gaussian rewards.
problem Improving the performance of Thompson Sampling in contextual bandits with sub-Gaussian rewards.
method Proved comprehensive bounds on Thompson Sampling expected cumulative regret based on mutual information and lifted information ratio for sub-Gaussian rewards.
result Explicit regret bounds for various contextual bandit scenarios.
We discuss a variant of Thompson sampling for nonparametric reinforcement learning in a countable classes of general stochastic environments. These environments can be non-Markov, non-ergodic, and partially observable. We show that Thompson sampling learns the environment class in the sense that (1) asymptotically its …
Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have made significant strides in performance on applications such as Go and Atari games. However, developing practical methods to balance exploration and exploitation in complex domains remains largely unsolved. Thompson Sampling and its extension to reinforcement learning…
Thompson Sampling is a well established approach to bandit and reinforcement learning problems. However its use in continuum armed bandit problems has received relatively little attention. We provide the first bounds on the regret of Thompson Sampling for continuum armed bandits under weak conditions on the function cl…
We study multi-armed bandit problems with graph feedback, in which the decision maker is allowed to observe the neighboring actions of the chosen action, in a setting where the graph may vary over time and is never fully revealed to the decision maker. We show that when the feedback graphs are undirected, the original …
In this note, we present a version of the Thompson sampling algorithm for the problem of online linear generalization with full information (i.e., the experts setting), studied by Kalai and Vempala, 2005. The algorithm uses a Gaussian prior and time-varying Gaussian likelihoods, and we show that it essentially reduces …
Thompson sampling has emerged as an effective heuristic for a broad range of online decision problems. In its basic form, the algorithm requires computing and sampling from a posterior distribution over models, which is tractable only for simple special cases. This paper develops ensemble sampling, which aims to approx…