banditry

Contextual bandit agents for black-box optimisation over mixed design spaces.

Documentation: vahanarsenian.github.io/banditry

banditry isolates the bandit routines from MetaFrieren into a standalone, reusable library. Its design-space interface and the MACE acquisition strategy are partially inspired by the HEBO repository from Huawei Noah's Ark Lab.

What it does

banditry runs a suggest → evaluate → observe loop against an expensive black-box objective (it minimises the observed values) and provides the pieces of that loop as composable modules:

• Agents (banditry.agents) — the decision-making policies:
  • GP-UCB / OFU agent (OFUGPAgent): optimism-in-the-face-of-uncertainty with either Bayesian or frequentist (Chowdhury–Gopalan) confidence widths, optimising the MACE multi-objective acquisition ensemble (mean, sigma, LCB).
  • Thompson-sampling agent (TSAgent): a neural value function whose posterior is sampled by an MCMC oracle, with optional Feel-Good Thompson sampling reweighting.
• Surrogates (banditry.surrogates) — exact Gaussian processes and sparse variational GPs (gpytorch), plus the neural ValueFunction used by TS.
• Optimisation oracles (banditry.optimisation_oracles) — evolutionary acquisition optimisers wrapping pymoo (NSGA-II / NSGA-III / U-NSGA-III) and an SGLD optimiser (stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics).
• Optimisation subroutines (banditry.optimisation_subroutines) — acquisition objectives (mean, sigma, LCB, MACE, Thompson objective) and the pymoo problem wrapper that handles contexts.
• Sampling oracles (banditry.sampling_oracles) — posterior samplers for the TS agent: Langevin dynamics (SGLD with a Welling–Teh step-size schedule) and NUTS (via pyro).
• Variable domains (banditry.variable_domains) — mixed design spaces with numeric, integer, boolean, and categorical parameters, plus the transforms (scaling, one-hot/embedding) used to feed them to the models.

Contexts are supported throughout: any subset of parameters can be pinned to observed environment values each round, turning the loop into a contextual bandit.

Best-so-far trace of plain vs Feel-Good Thompson sampling (Langevin posterior sampling) on the built-in gaussian_valley benchmark — reproduce with examples/04_feel_good_ts.py.

Installation

Requires Python 3.10+.

From PyPI:

pip install banditry

The NUTS sampler (used by TSConfig(sampler="nuts")) needs pyro, which is an optional extra:

pip install "banditry[nuts]"

From source, for development:

git clone https://github.com/VahanArsenian/banditry.git
cd banditry
pip install -e ".[nuts]"

Conda users can pip install banditry inside any conda environment; the core dependencies (numpy, pandas, torch, gpytorch, pymoo, rich) are resolved by pip.

Usage

Quickstart

import numpy as np

from banditry import DesignSpace, OFUGPConfig, build_agent

# Objective: minimise a 2-D function over a box.
def objective(df):
    x0 = df["x0"].to_numpy(dtype=float)
    x1 = df["x1"].to_numpy(dtype=float)
    return (x0 - 0.3) ** 2 + (x1 + 0.2) ** 2

space = DesignSpace.parse([
    {"name": "x0", "type": "num", "lb": -1, "ub": 1},
    {"name": "x1", "type": "num", "lb": -1, "ub": 1},
])

config = OFUGPConfig(rand_sample=4, surrogate="gp", noise_std_proxy=1.0)
agent = build_agent(config, space)

for _ in range(20):
    rec = agent.suggest(1)                                # DataFrame of suggestions
    y = np.asarray(objective(rec), dtype=float).reshape(-1)
    agent.observe(rec, y)                                 # agents minimise y

best_row = agent.get_best_id()                            # index of the best observation

The agent starts with rand_sample quasi-random (Sobol) warmup suggestions, then switches to model-based suggestions.

Mixed design spaces

All four parameter types can be combined freely:

space = DesignSpace.parse([
    {"name": "learning_rate", "type": "num",  "lb": 1e-4, "ub": 1e-1},
    {"name": "num_layers",    "type": "int",  "lb": 1,    "ub": 8},
    {"name": "use_dropout",   "type": "bool"},
    {"name": "optimiser",     "type": "cat",  "categories": ["adam", "sgd", "rmsprop"]},
])

Suggestions come back as a pandas DataFrame with one column per parameter, in the original (untransformed) domain.

Contextual bandits

Pass the observed context each round via the second argument of suggest; the pinned parameters are fixed while the rest are optimised conditionally:

context = {"x1": 0.7}            # observed environment state this round
rec = agent.suggest(1, context)  # x1 is pinned to 0.7 in the suggestion
y = np.asarray(objective(rec), dtype=float).reshape(-1)
agent.observe(rec, y)

best_for_context = agent.get_best_id(fix_input=context)

Thompson-sampling agents

from banditry import TSConfig, build_agent

# Langevin posterior sampling (no extra dependencies)
agent = build_agent(TSConfig(rand_sample=4, sampler="langevin"), space)

# NUTS posterior sampling (requires banditry[nuts])
agent = build_agent(TSConfig(rand_sample=4, sampler="nuts"), space)

# Feel-Good Thompson sampling
agent = build_agent(
    TSConfig(sampler="langevin", feel_good=True, fg_lambda=1.0, fg_bound=1.0),
    space,
)

Sampler behaviour is controlled through sampler_config; the defaults live in banditry.agents.factory.DEFAULT_LANGEVIN_CONFIG and DEFAULT_NUTS_CONFIG and can be copied and overridden:

from banditry.agents.factory import DEFAULT_LANGEVIN_CONFIG

config = TSConfig(
    sampler="langevin",
    sampler_config={**DEFAULT_LANGEVIN_CONFIG, "num_epochs": 256, "temperature": 0.1},
)

Agent configuration reference

OFUGPConfig (GP-UCB agents):

TSConfig (Thompson-sampling agents):

Benchmark runner

Installing the package also installs a banditry-bench CLI that exercises every agent on synthetic benchmarks:

banditry-bench --agent ofugp-gp    --benchmark branin          --n-iter 30 --seed 42
banditry-bench --agent ts-langevin --benchmark gaussian_valley --n-iter 30 --seed 42
banditry-bench --agent ofugp-svgp  --benchmark contextual_branin --n-iter 30 --seed 42

Agents: ofugp-gp, ofugp-svgp, ts-langevin, ts-nuts. Benchmarks: branin, contextual_branin, gaussian_valley, contextual_gaussian_valley.

Examples

Runnable, seeded example scripts live in examples/:

1. 01_quickstart_branin.py — GP-UCB on Branin
2. 02_mixed_design_space.py — num + int + bool + cat parameters
3. 03_contextual_bandit.py — pinning observed context via fix_input
4. 04_feel_good_ts.py — TS vs Feel-Good TS comparison plot

Origins & acknowledgements

• Partially inspired by HEBO (Huawei Noah's Ark Lab) — in particular the design-space interface and the MACE acquisition ensemble.
• Isolates the bandit routines from MetaFrieren into a standalone package.

Please cite

If you use banditry in your research, please cite:

@software{banditry,
  author  = {Arsenyan, Vahan},
  title   = {banditry: an online learning framework with optimism-in-the-face-of-uncertainty
             and posterior-sampling agents},
  year    = {2026},
  url     = {https://github.com/VahanArsenian/banditry},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.21495325},
  version = {0.3.1}
}

License

MIT. Portions derive from HEBO (Huawei Noah's Ark Lab), also MIT-licensed — see NOTICE.