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We study the multi-armed bandit problem where the rewards are realizations of general non-stationary stochastic processes, a setting that generalizes many existing lines of work and analyses. In particular, we present a theoretical analysis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-04 Corinna Cortes , Giulia DeSalvo , Vitaly Kuznetsov , Mehryar Mohri , Scott Yang

In multi-armed bandit problems, the typical goal is to identify the arm with the highest reward. This paper explores a threshold-based bandit problem, aiming to select an arm based on its relation to a prescribed threshold \(\tau \). We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Chanakya Varude , Jay Chaudhary , Siddharth Kaushik , Prasanna Chaporkar

We consider stochastic multi-armed bandits where the expected reward is a unimodal function over partially ordered arms. This important class of problems has been recently investigated in (Cope 2009, Yu 2011). The set of arms is either…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-05-21 Richard Combes , Alexandre Proutiere

We consider the multi armed bandit problem in non-stationary environments. Based on the Bayesian method, we propose a variant of Thompson Sampling which can be used in both rested and restless bandit scenarios. Applying discounting to the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-08-01 Vishnu Raj , Sheetal Kalyani

We consider a multiobjective multiarmed bandit problem with lexicographically ordered objectives. In this problem, the goal of the learner is to select arms that are lexicographic optimal as much as possible without knowing the arm reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-30 Alihan Hüyük , Cem Tekin

We analyze the $K$-armed bandit problem where the reward for each arm is a noisy realization based on an observed context under mild nonparametric assumptions. We attain tight results for top-arm identification and a sublinear regret of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-08 Melody Y. Guan , Heinrich Jiang

We investigate the fixed-budget best-arm identification (BAI) problem for linear bandits in a potentially non-stationary environment. Given a finite arm set $\mathcal{X}\subset\mathbb{R}^d$, a fixed budget $T$, and an unpredictable sequence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Zhihan Xiong , Romain Camilleri , Maryam Fazel , Lalit Jain , Kevin Jamieson

We consider the problem of identifying the best arm in stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits (MABs) using a fixed sampling budget. Characterizing the minimal instance-specific error probability for this problem constitutes one of the important…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Po-An Wang , Ruo-Chun Tzeng , Alexandre Proutiere

We address the M-best-arm identification problem in multi-armed bandits. A player has a limited budget to explore K arms (M<K), and once pulled, each arm yields a reward drawn (independently) from a fixed, unknown distribution. The goal is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-11 Shahin Shahrampour , Vahid Tarokh

Combinatorial bandits extend the classical bandit framework to settings where the learner selects multiple arms in each round, motivated by applications such as online recommendation and assortment optimization. While extensions of upper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Yuxiao Wen , Yanjun Han , Zhengyuan Zhou

We revisit the classic regret-minimization problem in the stochastic multi-armed bandit setting when the arm-distributions are allowed to be heavy-tailed. Regret minimization has been well studied in simpler settings of either bounded…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Shubhada Agrawal , Sandeep Juneja , Wouter M. Koolen

We consider best arm identification in the multi-armed bandit problem. Assuming certain continuity conditions of the prior, we characterize the rate of the Bayesian simple regret. Differing from Bayesian regret minimization (Lai, 1987), the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-27 Junpei Komiyama , Kaito Ariu , Masahiro Kato , Chao Qin

We propose a generalization of the best arm identification problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB) to the setting where every pull of an arm is associated with delayed feedback. The delay in feedback increases the effective sample…

The pure-exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits aims to find one or more arms with the largest (or near largest) means. Examples include finding an {\epsilon}-good arm, best-arm identification, top-k arm identification, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-14 Blake Mason , Lalit Jain , Ardhendu Tripathy , Robert Nowak

We study the problem of learning 'good' interventions in a stochastic environment modeled by its underlying causal graph. Good interventions refer to interventions that maximize rewards. Specifically, we consider the setting of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Fateme Jamshidi , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash

We introduce a new stochastic multi-armed bandit setting where arms are grouped inside ``ordered'' categories. The motivating example comes from e-commerce, where a customer typically has a greater appetence for items of a specific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-05 Matthieu Jedor , Jonathan Louedec , Vianney Perchet

The evaluation of hyperparameters, neural architectures, or data augmentation policies becomes a critical model selection problem in advanced deep learning with a large hyperparameter search space. In this paper, we propose an efficient and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-17 Yimin Huang , Yujun Li , Hanrong Ye , Zhenguo Li , Zhihua Zhang

We present a new bandit algorithm, SAO (Stochastic and Adversarial Optimal), whose regret is, essentially, optimal both for adversarial rewards and for stochastic rewards. Specifically, SAO combines the square-root worst-case regret of Exp3…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-02-22 Sebastien Bubeck , Aleksandrs Slivkins

We study the benefits of sparsity in nonparametric contextual bandit problems, in which the set of candidate features is countably or uncountably infinite. Our contribution is two-fold. First, using a novel reduction to sequences of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-16 Hamish Flynn , Julia Olkhovskaya , Paul Rognon-Vael

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-03-08 Antoine Barrier , Aurélien Garivier , Tomáš Kocák