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arXiv · 2002.08436

Residual Bootstrap Exploration for Bandit Algorithms

Chi-Hua Wang·Yang Yu·Botao Hao·Guang Cheng
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Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel perturbation-based exploration method in bandit algorithms with bounded or unbounded rewards, called residual bootstrap exploration (\texttt{ReBoot}). The \texttt{ReBoot} enforces exploration by injecting data-driven randomness through a residual-based perturbation mechanism. This novel mechanism captures the underlying distributional properties of fitting errors, and more importantly boosts exploration to escape from suboptimal solutions (for small sample sizes) by inflating variance level in an \textit{unconventional} way. In theory, with appropriate variance inflation level, \texttt{ReBoot} provably secures instance-dependent logarithmic regret in Gaussian multi-armed bandits. We evaluate the \texttt{ReBoot} in different synthetic multi-armed bandits problems and observe that the \texttt{ReBoot} performs better for unbounded rewards and more robustly than \texttt{Giro} \cite{kveton2018garbage} and \texttt{PHE} \cite{kveton2019perturbed}, with comparable computational efficiency to the Thompson sampling method.

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Chi-Hua Wang, Yang Yu, Botao Hao, Guang Cheng. 2020-02-19. Residual Bootstrap Exploration for Bandit Algorithms. https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.08436

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