Kullback-Leibler Maillard Sampling for Multi-armed Bandits with Bounded Rewards

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Qin, Hao, Jun, Kwang-Sung, Zhang, Chicheng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Qin, Hao
Jun, Kwang-Sung
Zhang, Chicheng
author_facet Qin, Hao
Jun, Kwang-Sung
Zhang, Chicheng
contents We study $K$-armed bandit problems where the reward distributions of the arms are all supported on the $[0,1]$ interval. It has been a challenge to design regret-efficient randomized exploration algorithms in this setting. Maillard sampling \cite{maillard13apprentissage}, an attractive alternative to Thompson sampling, has recently been shown to achieve competitive regret guarantees in the sub-Gaussian reward setting \cite{bian2022maillard} while maintaining closed-form action probabilities, which is useful for offline policy evaluation. In this work, we propose the Kullback-Leibler Maillard Sampling (KL-MS) algorithm, a natural extension of Maillard sampling for achieving KL-style gap-dependent regret bound. We show that KL-MS enjoys the asymptotic optimality when the rewards are Bernoulli and has a worst-case regret bound of the form $O(\sqrt{μ^*(1-μ^*) K T \ln K} + K \ln T)$, where $μ^*$ is the expected reward of the optimal arm, and $T$ is the time horizon length.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2304_14989
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Kullback-Leibler Maillard Sampling for Multi-armed Bandits with Bounded Rewards
Qin, Hao
Jun, Kwang-Sung
Zhang, Chicheng
Machine Learning
We study $K$-armed bandit problems where the reward distributions of the arms are all supported on the $[0,1]$ interval. It has been a challenge to design regret-efficient randomized exploration algorithms in this setting. Maillard sampling \cite{maillard13apprentissage}, an attractive alternative to Thompson sampling, has recently been shown to achieve competitive regret guarantees in the sub-Gaussian reward setting \cite{bian2022maillard} while maintaining closed-form action probabilities, which is useful for offline policy evaluation. In this work, we propose the Kullback-Leibler Maillard Sampling (KL-MS) algorithm, a natural extension of Maillard sampling for achieving KL-style gap-dependent regret bound. We show that KL-MS enjoys the asymptotic optimality when the rewards are Bernoulli and has a worst-case regret bound of the form $O(\sqrt{μ^*(1-μ^*) K T \ln K} + K \ln T)$, where $μ^*$ is the expected reward of the optimal arm, and $T$ is the time horizon length.
title Kullback-Leibler Maillard Sampling for Multi-armed Bandits with Bounded Rewards
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.14989