We address the problem of online sequential decision making, i.e., balancing the trade-off between exploiting the current knowledge to maximize immediate performance and exploring the new information to gain long-term benefits using the multi-armed bandit framework. Thompson sampling is one of the heuristics for choosing actions that address this exploration-exploitation dilemma. We first propose a general framework that helps heuristically tune the exploration versus exploitation trade-off in Thompson sampling using multiple samples from the posterior distribution. Utilizing this framework, we propose two algorithms for the multi-armed bandit problem and provide theoretical bounds on the cumulative regret. Next, we demonstrate the empirical improvement in the cumulative regret performance of the proposed algorithm over Thompson Sampling. We also show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm on real-world datasets. Contrary to the existing methods, our framework provides a mechanism to vary the amount of exploration/ exploitation based on the task at hand. Towards this end, we extend our framework for two additional problems, i.e., best arm identification and time-sensitive learning in bandits and compare our algorithm with existing methods.

文章提出了一种基于多臂赌博框架的在线顺序决策支持方法，利用Thompson抽样来平衡探索与利用的权衡，提出了两种算法用以解决多臂赌博问题，并在理论上给出了广义下界，通过实验证明了该方法在现实世界的数据集上表现的有效性。

带虚拟协助代理的汤普森抽样