Improved Regret of Linear Ensemble Sampling

Authors: Harin Lee, Min-hwan Oh

NeurIPS 2024 | Conference PDF | Archive PDF | Plain Text | LLM Run Details

Reproducibility Variable Result LLM Response
Research Type Theoretical In this work, we close the fundamental gap of theory and practice by providing an improved regret bound for linear ensemble sampling. We prove that with an ensemble size logarithmic in T, linear ensemble sampling can achieve a frequentist regret bound of e O(d3/2 T), matching state-of-the-art results for randomized linear bandit algorithms, where d and T are the dimension of the parameter and the time horizon respectively. Our approach introduces a general regret analysis framework for linear bandit algorithms. Additionally, we reveal a significant relationship between linear ensemble sampling and Linear Perturbed-History Exploration (Lin PHE), showing that Lin PHE is a special case of linear ensemble sampling when the ensemble size equals T. This insight allows us to derive a new regret bound of e O(d3/2 T) for Lin PHE, independent of the number of arms. Our contributions advance the theoretical foundation of ensemble sampling, bringing its regret bounds in line with the best known bounds for other randomized exploration algorithms. The paper does not include experiments.
Researcher Affiliation Academia Harin Lee Seoul National University Seoul, South Korea harinboy@snu.ac.kr Min-hwan Oh Seoul National University Seoul, South Korea minoh@snu.ac.kr
Pseudocode Yes Algorithm 1 Linear Ensemble Sampling and Algorithm 2 Linear Perturbed-History Exploration (Lin PHE)
Open Source Code No The paper does not include experiments, nor does it provide an explicit statement about releasing code or a link to a code repository.
Open Datasets No The paper is theoretical and does not involve experiments or datasets, as confirmed by the NeurIPS checklist: 'The paper does not include experiments.'
Dataset Splits No The paper is theoretical and does not involve experiments or dataset splits, as confirmed by the NeurIPS checklist: 'The paper does not include experiments.'
Hardware Specification No The paper is theoretical and does not involve experiments requiring hardware specifications, as confirmed by the NeurIPS checklist: 'The paper does not include experiments.'
Software Dependencies No The paper is theoretical and does not involve experiments requiring software dependencies, as confirmed by the NeurIPS checklist: 'The paper does not include experiments.'
Experiment Setup No The paper is theoretical and does not involve experiments or an experimental setup, as confirmed by the NeurIPS checklist: 'The paper does not include experiments.'