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Autores principales: Flynn, Hamish, Olkhovskaya, Julia, Rognon-Vael, Paul
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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Acceso en línea:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16382
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author Flynn, Hamish
Olkhovskaya, Julia
Rognon-Vael, Paul
author_facet Flynn, Hamish
Olkhovskaya, Julia
Rognon-Vael, Paul
contents We study the benefits of sparsity in nonparametric contextual bandit problems, in which the set of candidate features is countably or uncountably infinite. Our contribution is two-fold. First, using a novel reduction to sequences of multi-armed bandit problems, we provide lower bounds on the minimax regret, which show that polynomial dependence on the number of actions is generally unavoidable in this setting. Second, we show that a variant of the Feel-Good Thompson Sampling algorithm enjoys regret bounds that match our lower bounds up to logarithmic factors of the horizon, and have logarithmic dependence on the effective number of candidate features. When we apply our results to kernelised and neural contextual bandits, we find that sparsity enables better regret bounds whenever the horizon is large enough relative to the sparsity and the number of actions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_16382
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sparse Nonparametric Contextual Bandits
Flynn, Hamish
Olkhovskaya, Julia
Rognon-Vael, Paul
Machine Learning
We study the benefits of sparsity in nonparametric contextual bandit problems, in which the set of candidate features is countably or uncountably infinite. Our contribution is two-fold. First, using a novel reduction to sequences of multi-armed bandit problems, we provide lower bounds on the minimax regret, which show that polynomial dependence on the number of actions is generally unavoidable in this setting. Second, we show that a variant of the Feel-Good Thompson Sampling algorithm enjoys regret bounds that match our lower bounds up to logarithmic factors of the horizon, and have logarithmic dependence on the effective number of candidate features. When we apply our results to kernelised and neural contextual bandits, we find that sparsity enables better regret bounds whenever the horizon is large enough relative to the sparsity and the number of actions.
title Sparse Nonparametric Contextual Bandits
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16382