Paper ID: 2410.05441

Thompson Sampling For Combinatorial Bandits: Polynomial Regret and Mismatched Sampling Paradox

Raymond Zhang, Richard Combes

We consider Thompson Sampling (TS) for linear combinatorial semi-bandits and subgaussian rewards. We propose the first known TS whose finite-time regret does not scale exponentially with the dimension of the problem. We further show the "mismatched sampling paradox": A learner who knows the rewards distributions and samples from the correct posterior distribution can perform exponentially worse than a learner who does not know the rewards and simply samples from a well-chosen Gaussian posterior. The code used to generate the experiments is available at this https URL

Submitted: Oct 7, 2024