English
Related papers

Related papers: Functional Bandits

200 papers

We consider the best-arm identification problem in multi-armed bandits, which focuses purely on exploration. A player is given a fixed budget to explore a finite set of arms, and the rewards of each arm are drawn independently from a fixed,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-08-02 Shahin Shahrampour , Mohammad Noshad , Vahid Tarokh

Decision making under uncertain environments in the maximization of expected reward while minimizing its risk is one of the ubiquitous problems in many subjects. Here, we introduce a novel problem setting in stochastic bandit optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Shunta Nonaga , Koji Tabata , Yuta Mizuno , Tamiki Komatsuzaki

Active learning methods have shown great promise in reducing the number of samples necessary for learning. As automated learning systems are adopted into real-time, real-world decision-making pipelines, it is increasingly important that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Romain Camilleri , Andrew Wagenmaker , Jamie Morgenstern , Lalit Jain , Kevin Jamieson

This paper investigates the problem of best arm identification in $\textit{contaminated}$ stochastic multi-arm bandits. In this setting, the rewards obtained from any arm are replaced by samples from an adversarial model with probability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-16 Arpan Mukherjee , Ali Tajer , Pin-Yu Chen , Payel Das

We investigate top-$m$ arm identification, a basic problem in bandit theory, in a multi-agent learning model in which agents collaborate to learn an objective function. We are interested in designing collaborative learning algorithms that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Nikolai Karpov , Qin Zhang

Recently multi-armed bandit problem arises in many real-life scenarios where arms must be sampled in batches, due to limited time the agent can wait for the feedback. Such applications include biological experimentation and online…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-22 Shengyu Cao , Simai He , Ruoqing Jiang , Jin Xu , Hongsong Yuan

A latent bandit problem is one in which the learning agent knows the arm reward distributions conditioned on an unknown discrete latent state. The primary goal of the agent is to identify the latent state, after which it can act optimally.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-17 Joey Hong , Branislav Kveton , Manzil Zaheer , Yinlam Chow , Amr Ahmed , Craig Boutilier

Over the past few years, the multi-armed bandit model has become increasingly popular in the machine learning community, partly because of applications including online content optimization. This paper reviews two different sequential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Emilie Kaufmann , Aurélien Garivier

We examine a multi-armed bandit problem with contextual information, where the objective is to ensure that each arm receives a minimum aggregated reward across contexts while simultaneously maximizing the total cumulative reward. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Ahmed Ben Yahmed , Hafedh El Ferchichi , Marc Abeille , Vianney Perchet

We study finite-armed stochastic bandits where the rewards of each arm might be correlated to those of other arms. We introduce a novel phased algorithm that exploits the given structure to build confidence sets over the parameters of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Andrea Tirinzoni , Alessandro Lazaric , Marcello Restelli

We consider the problem of \textit{best arm identification} with a \textit{fixed budget $T$}, in the $K$-armed stochastic bandit setting, with arms distribution defined on $[0,1]$. We prove that any bandit strategy, for at least one bandit…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-05-31 Alexandra Carpentier , Andrea Locatelli

Classical multi-armed bandit problems use the expected value of an arm as a metric to evaluate its goodness. However, the expected value is a risk-neutral metric. In many applications like finance, one is interested in balancing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Anmol Kagrecha , Jayakrishnan Nair , Krishna Jagannathan

We consider a variant of the contextual bandit problem. In standard contextual bandits, when a user arrives we get the user's complete feature vector and then assign a treatment (arm) to that user. In a number of applications (like…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Susan Athey

Motivated by applications such as online labor markets we consider a variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where we have a collection of arms representing strategic agents with different performance characteristics. The…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Seyed A. Esmaeili , Suho Shin , Aleksandrs Slivkins

Motivated by a natural problem in online model selection with bandit information, we introduce and analyze a best arm identification problem in the rested bandit setting, wherein arm expected losses decrease with the number of times the arm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-08 Leonardo Cella , Claudio Gentile , Massimiliano Pontil

We study a multi-objective pure exploration problem in a multi-armed bandit model. Each arm is associated to an unknown multi-variate distribution and the goal is to identify the distributions whose mean is not uniformly worse than that of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-15 Cyrille Kone , Emilie Kaufmann , Laura Richert

Contextual bandits are a form of multi-armed bandit in which the agent has access to predictive side information (known as the context) for each arm at each time step, and have been used to model personalized news recommendation, ad…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-05-25 Aniket Anand Deshmukh , Urun Dogan , Clayton Scott

We study the best-arm identification problem in multi-armed bandits with stochastic, potentially private rewards, when the goal is to identify the arm with the highest quantile at a fixed, prescribed level. First, we propose a (non-private)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-06 Kontantinos E. Nikolakakis , Dionysios S. Kalogerias , Or Sheffet , Anand D. Sarwate

We consider the classical multi-armed bandit problem, but with strategic arms. In this context, each arm is characterized by a bounded support reward distribution and strategically aims to maximize its own utility by potentially retaining a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Ahmed Ben Yahmed , Clément Calauzènes , Vianney Perchet

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Emil Carlsson , Debabrota Basu , Fredrik D. Johansson , Devdatt Dubhashi