Related papers: On Finding the Largest Mean Among Many
We study exploration in stochastic multi-armed bandits when we have access to a divisible resource that can be allocated in varying amounts to arm pulls. We focus in particular on the allocation of distributed computing resources, where we…
Traditional multi-armed bandit (MAB) formulations usually make certain assumptions about the underlying arms' distributions, such as bounds on the support or their tail behaviour. Moreover, such parametric information is usually 'baked'…
In algorithm optimization in reinforcement learning, how to deal with the exploration-exploitation dilemma is particularly important. Multi-armed bandit problem can optimize the proposed solutions by changing the reward distribution to…
Motivated by recursive learning in Markov Decision Processes, this paper studies best-arm identification in bandit problems where each arm's reward is drawn from a multinomial distribution with a known support. We compare the performance {…
Best-arm identification (BAI) in a fixed-budget setting is a bandit problem where the learning agent maximizes the probability of identifying the optimal (best) arm after a fixed number of observations. Most works on this topic study…
In multi-armed bandits, the tasks of reward maximization and pure exploration are often at odds with each other. The former focuses on exploiting arms with the highest means, while the latter may require constant exploration across all…
We study the Improving Multi-Armed Bandit (IMAB) problem, where the reward obtained from an arm increases with the number of pulls it receives. This model provides an elegant abstraction for many real-world problems in domains such as…
Many real-world functions are defined over both categorical and category-specific continuous variables and thus cannot be optimized by traditional Bayesian optimization (BO) methods. To optimize such functions, we propose a new method that…
We consider the query recommendation problem in closed loop interactive learning settings like online information gathering and exploratory analytics. The problem can be naturally modelled using the Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) framework with…
We study the problem of selecting $K$ arms with the highest expected rewards in a stochastic $n$-armed bandit game. This problem has a wide range of applications, e.g., A/B testing, crowdsourcing, simulation optimization. Our goal is to…
Best arm identification (BAI) aims to identify the highest-performance arm among a set of $K$ arms by collecting stochastic samples from each arm. In real-world problems, the best arm needs to satisfy additional feasibility constraints.…
Motivated by distributed selection problems, we formulate a new variant of multi-player multi-armed bandit (MAB) model, which captures stochastic arrival of requests to each arm, as well as the policy of allocating requests to players. The…
We consider the problem of near-optimal arm identification in the fixed confidence setting of the infinitely armed bandit problem when nothing is known about the arm reservoir distribution. We (1) introduce a PAC-like framework within which…
We study the problem of finding the optimal dosage in early stage clinical trials through the multi-armed bandit lens. We advocate the use of the Thompson Sampling principle, a flexible algorithm that can accommodate different types of…
This paper considers a multi-armed bandit game where the number of arms is much larger than the maximum budget and is effectively infinite. We characterize necessary and sufficient conditions on the total budget for an algorithm to return…
Large language models (LLMs) have been adopted to solve sequential decision-making tasks such as multi-armed bandits (MAB), in which an LLM is directly instructed to select the arms to pull in every iteration. However, this paradigm of…
We address the problem of identifying the optimal policy with a fixed confidence level in a multi-armed bandit setup, when \emph{the arms are subject to linear constraints}. Unlike the standard best-arm identification problem which is well…
We propose a new strategy for best-arm identification with fixed confidence of Gaussian variables with bounded means and unit variance. This strategy, called Exploration-Biased Sampling, is not only asymptotically optimal: it is to the best…
In this paper we revisit the fixed-confidence identification of the Pareto optimal set in a multi-objective multi-armed bandit model. As the sample complexity to identify the exact Pareto set can be very large, a relaxation allowing to…
This paper studies the fixed-confidence best arm identification (BAI) problem in the bandit framework in the canonical single-parameter exponential models. For this problem, many policies have been proposed, but most of them require solving…