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Stochastic multi-armed bandits are a sequential-decision-making framework, where, at each interaction step, the learner selects an arm and observes a stochastic reward. Within the context of best-arm identification (BAI) problems, the goal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-15 Riccardo Poiani , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

Learning paradigms based purely on offline data as well as those based solely on sequential online learning have been well-studied in the literature. In this paper, we consider combining offline data with online learning, an area less…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Shubhada Agrawal , Sandeep Juneja , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Arun Sai Suggala

This paper introduces the framework of multi-armed sampling, which serves as the sampling counterpart to the optimization problem of multi-armed bandits. Our primary motivation is to rigorously examine the exploration-exploitation trade-off…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Mohammad Pedramfar , Siamak Ravanbakhsh

The classical multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem involves a learner and a collection of K independent arms, each with its own ex ante unknown independent reward distribution. At each one of a finite number of rounds, the learner selects one…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-07 Hongda Hu , Arthur Charpentier , Mario Ghossoub , Alexander Schied

We consider the problem of identifying the best arm in a multi-armed bandit model. Despite a wealth of literature in the traditional fixed budget and fixed confidence regimes of the best arm identification problem, it still remains a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-08 Michael O. Harding , Kirthevasan Kandasamy

The stochastic multi-arm bandit problem has been extensively studied under standard assumptions on the arm's distribution (e.g bounded with known support, exponential family, etc). These assumptions are suitable for many real-world problems…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-19 Dorian Baudry , Patrick Saux , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard

We study the pure exploration problem subject to a matroid constraint (Best-Basis) in a stochastic multi-armed bandit game. In a Best-Basis instance, we are given $n$ stochastic arms with unknown reward distributions, as well as a matroid…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-26 Lijie Chen , Anupam Gupta , Jian Li

We study the Pareto Set Identification (PSI) problem in a structured multi-output linear bandit model. In this setting, each arm is associated a feature vector belonging to $\mathbb{R}^h$, and its mean vector in $\mathbb{R}^d$ linearly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-08 Cyrille Kone , Emilie Kaufmann , Laura Richert

This paper proposes near-optimal algorithms for the pure-exploration linear bandit problem in the fixed confidence and fixed budget settings. Leveraging ideas from the theory of suprema of empirical processes, we provide an algorithm whose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Julian Katz-Samuels , Lalit Jain , Zohar Karnin , Kevin Jamieson

We consider a variant of the best arm identification task in stochastic multi-armed bandits. Motivated by risk-averse decision-making problems, our goal is to identify a set of $m$ arms with the highest $\tau$-quantile values within a fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Mengyan Zhang , Cheng Soon Ong

Best arm identification (or, pure exploration) in multi-armed bandits is a fundamental problem in machine learning. In this paper we study the distributed version of this problem where we have multiple agents, and they want to learn the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-02 Chao Tao , Qin Zhang , Yuan Zhou

In this paper, we study a variant of best-arm identification involving elements of risk sensitivity and communication constraints. Specifically, the goal of the learner is to identify the arm with the highest quantile reward, while the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-11 Ivan Lau , Jonathan Scarlett

We study the fixed-budget best-arm identification (BAI) problem in non-stationary linear bandits. Concretely, given a fixed time budget $T\in \mathbb{N}$, finite arm set $\mathcal{X} \subset \mathbb{R}^d$, and a potentially adversarial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-12 Leo Maynard-Zhang , Zhihan Xiong , Kevin Jamieson , Maryam Fazel

In this paper, we consider a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, MAB with cost subsidy, which models many real-life applications where the learning agent has to pay to select an arm and is concerned about optimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Deeksha Sinha , Karthik Abinav Sankararama , Abbas Kazerouni , Vashist Avadhanula

This paper considers the problem of combinatorial multi-armed bandits with semi-bandit feedback and a cardinality constraint on the super-arm size. Existing algorithms for solving this problem typically involve two key sub-routines: (1) a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Arpan Mukherjee , Shashanka Ubaru , Keerthiram Murugesan , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Ali Tajer

We consider a bandit problem where the buget is smaller than the number of arms, which may be infinite. In this regime, the usual objective in the literature is to minimize simple regret. To analyze broad classes of distributions with…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-11-04 Emmanuel Pilliat

Multi-armed bandits (MAB) model sequential decision making problems, in which a learner sequentially chooses arms with unknown reward distributions in order to maximize its cumulative reward. Most of the prior work on MAB assumes that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-22 Onur Atan , Cem Tekin , Mihaela van der Schaar

We study fairness within the stochastic, \emph{multi-armed bandit} (MAB) decision making framework. We adapt the fairness framework of "treating similar individuals similarly" to this setting. Here, an `individual' corresponds to an arm and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-07 Yang Liu , Goran Radanovic , Christos Dimitrakakis , Debmalya Mandal , David C. Parkes

Consider the problem of finding a population or a probability distribution amongst many with the largest mean when these means are unknown but population samples can be simulated or otherwise generated. Typically, by selecting largest…

Probability · Mathematics 2018-09-11 Peter Glynn , Sandeep Juneja

This work formulates model selection as an infinite-armed bandit problem, namely, a problem in which a decision maker iteratively selects one of an infinite number of fixed choices (i.e., arms) when the properties of each choice are only…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Margaux Brégère , Julie Keisler