arXiv Machine Learning By Thomas Kesselheim, Marco Molinaro, Kalen Patton, Sahil Singla

Online Algorithms via Minimax and Posterior Matching

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arXiv:2608. 01616v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Competitive analysis is central to the study of online algorithms, but upper bounds are often highly problem-specific.

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arXiv Machine Learning
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Kernel Methods for Refined Prophet Inequalities

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By Patrick Loiseau, Mathieu Molina, Vianney Perchet, Sebastian Perez-Salazar, Victor Verdugo
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

Asymptotic Optimality of Thompson Sampling for Risk-Averse Bandits with Sub-Gaussian Rewards

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
arXiv AI
Jul 14

Efficient Online Proportional Sampling with Applications to Smoothed Online Learning

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By Amirmahdi Mirfakhar, Maria-Florina Balcan, Hedyeh Beyhaghi
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 8

Asymptotic Optimality of Thompson Sampling for Risk-Averse Bandits with Sub-Gaussian Rewards

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.