提出新方法让贝叶斯强化学习更稳定高效,无需每轮调参。
Rethinking Langevin Thompson Sampling from A Stochastic Approximation Perspective
- 用随机逼近思想统一后验近似,每轮只用最新奖励更新
- 固定步长下实现近最优后悔值,理论分析更简洁
- 实测单步更新+预热即可超越现有方法,适合实际部署
现有近似汤普森采样算法在多臂赌博机中常使用随机梯度朗之万动力学(SGLD)或其变体,在每轮采样后验分布,但需对不同轮次调整超参数(如动态学习率),导致理论分析和实现困难。为此,本文提出TS-SA,将随机逼近(SA)引入汤普森采样框架:每轮仅基于最新奖励构建后验近似,执行朗之万蒙特卡洛(LMC)更新,并通过SA步骤对噪声提议进行时间平均。该方法可视为对全局静态后验目标的近似,支持固定步长、统一收敛性分析,并提升后验估计精度。我们建立了近最优后悔界,且理论分析因将整个算法视为平稳SGLD过程模拟而大幅简化。实验表明,即使仅单步朗之万更新加预热,也显著优于现有方法。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Most existing approximate Thompson Sampling (TS) algorithms for multi-armed bandits use Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) or its variants in each round to sample from the posterior, relaxing the need for conjugacy assumptions between priors and reward distributions in vanilla TS. However, they often require approximating a different posterior distribution in different round of the bandit problem. This requires tricky, round-specific tuning of hyperparameters such as dynamic learning rates, causing challenges in both theoretical analysis and practical implementation. To alleviate this non-stationarity, we introduce TS-SA, which incorporates stochastic approximation (SA) within the TS framework. In each round, TS-SA constructs a posterior approximation only using the most recent reward(s), performs a Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) update, and applies an SA step to average noisy proposals over time. This can be interpreted as approximating a stationary posterior target throughout the entire algorithm, which further yields a fixed step-size, a unified convergence analysis framework, and improved posterior estimates through temporal averaging. We establish near-optimal regret bounds for TS-SA, with a simplified and more intuitive theoretical analysis enabled by interpreting the entire algorithm as a simulation of a stationary SGLD process. Our empirical results demonstrate that even a single-step Langevin update with certain warm-up outperforms existing methods substantially on bandit tasks.
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