arXiv Machine Learning
6d ago

Thompson Sampling for Non-Monotone Convex Ridge Bandits: Monotonicity Is Not Needed for Polynomial Regret

arXiv:2609. 10981v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bakhtiari, Lattimore and Szepesv\'ari (COLT 2025) proved that Thompson sampling (TS) has Bayesian regret $\tilde O(d^{5/2}\sqrt n)$ for bandit convex optimisation with convex \emph{monotone} ridge losses $f(x)=\ell(\ip{x}{\theta})$, and asked whether monotonicity of the link is necessary.

By Xuan Li
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