arXiv:2606. 28616v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In stochastic linear bandits, the canonical Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithm admits a simple frequentist regret analysis but can be computationally demanding, while Thompson Sampling (TS) is computationally attractive yet typically harder to analyze due to its non-optimistic nature.
By Toshinori Kitamura, Shuai Liu, Csaba Szepesv\'ari
arXiv:2502. 08870v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We provide an approach for the analysis of randomised exploration algorithms like Thompson sampling that does not rely on forced optimism or posterior inflation.
By Marc Abeille, David Janz, Ciara Pike-Burke
arXiv:2606. 00431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove a variance-sensitive regret bound for Thompson sampling in stochastic generalised linear bandits.
By Tom Perneczky, Marc Abeille, David Janz
arXiv:2608. 01069v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bandit algorithms generate data for downstream inference, but adaptive sampling biases post-bandit sample means.
By Lisu Wang, Yilun Chen, Jiaqi Lu
arXiv:2607. 12389v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider Bayesian bandit models and prove that Thompson sampling makes at most twice the expected number of mistakes (selections of a suboptimal arm) as any other policy.
By Mark Sellke, Gregory Valiant
arXiv:2605. 09454v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the $\textit{single-index bandit}$ problem, where rewards depend on an unknown one-dimensional projection of high-dimensional contexts through an unknown reward function.
By Devdan Dey, Sujoy Bhore, Avishek Ghosh
arXiv:2604. 20024v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study replicable algorithms for stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB) and linear bandits with UCB (Upper Confidence Bound) based exploration.
By Rohan Deb, Udaya Ghai, Karan Singh, Arindam Banerjee
arXiv:2502. 13467v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The $K$-Max combinatorial multi-armed bandit problem arises in applications such as recommendation and distributed decision making, where the reward is determined by the maximum outcome among $K$ selected arms.
By Yu Chen, Siwei Wang, Longbo Huang, Wei Chen
arXiv:2607. 23679v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent years have witnessed increasing interests in tackling heteroscedastic noise in bandits and reinforcement learning.
By Heyang Zhao, Tianyuan Jin, Weixin Wang, Vincent Y. F. Tan, Pan Xu, Quanquan Gu
arXiv:2402. 07391v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider a replicable stochastic multi-armed bandit algorithm that ensures, with high probability, that the algorithm's sequence of actions is not affected by the randomness inherent in the dataset.
By Junpei Komiyama, Shinji Ito, Yuichi Yoshida, Souta Koshino
We prove that $ρ\text{-}\mathrm{NPTS}_{\mathrm{SG}}$, an anchor-free nonparametric Thompson Sampling algorithm for risk-averse bandits, achieves regret matching the instance-dependent lower bound to leading order in $\log n$, establishing it as asymptotically optimal for any continuous risk functional $ρ$ (CVaR, mean-variance, Sharpe ratio, distortion risk measures, and more) on the class of distributions with bounded density and sub-Gaussian tails, including Gaussian arms. Both this result and its bounded-support counterpart require only continuity of $ρ$: strictly weaker than the dominance condition of prior parametric Thompson Sampling results, and strictly weaker than the Lipschitz condition of UCB-type algorithms, yielding the first instance-optimal guarantees for non-Lipschitz functionals such as the Sharpe ratio without parametric reward assumptions.
arXiv:2606. 09191v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove that $\rho\text{-}\mathrm{NPTS}_{\mathrm{SG}}$, an anchor-free nonparametric Thompson Sampling algorithm for risk-averse bandits, achieves regret matching the instance-dependent lower bound to leading order in $\log n$, establishing it as asymptotically optimal for any continuous risk functional $\rho$ (CVaR, mean-variance, Sharpe ratio, distortion risk measures, and more) on the class of distributions with bounded density and sub-Gaussian tails, including Gaussian arms.
By Joel Q. L. Chang